Justice in America is Dead

It's time to face facts.  

We've come a long, long way from those days, just months ago, when Trump faced over 90 indictments for crimes he committed against "we, the people."  From an insurrection aimed at overturning the Constitutional guarantee of the peaceful transfer of power, and the crimes committed in carrying that out, to stealing classified documents exposing our country to espionage, to intimidating and lying to poll workers and attempting to subvert election results in Georgia, to committing fraud in order to avoid having an affair with a porn star exposed prior to an election, it's all been lost in the incredible bureaucracy of various levels of the legal system that seem almost designed to protect political criminals like Trump from ever being brought to justice.  

When all of this started happening, I really didn't want to listen to the few voices raised in doubt about whether any of this would ever come to anything more than just media talk.  "Now we've finally got him!" was a phrase I heard and saw in multiple places, especially where Democrats gather to discuss politics.  

"Finally!  He's not going to get out of this so easily!"  

There were plenty of defenders for Attorney General Merrick Garland, who, following the damning Congressional investigation into January 6th in which two Republican members of the house sacrificed their political careers to join, appeared to be dragging his feet, not really doing anything to move the case against Trump forward.  I really wanted to believe, so badly, that he was feverishly putting things together out of sight, for the sake of not exposing the prosecution's hand, and that the bureaucratic system that moves like a turtle most of the time was being pushed to produce results.  

But it turns out, he really was dragging his feet, something he eventually admitted to doing.  I'm not sure where the pressure came from, but once a special prosecutor was named, and he eventually got indictments, there were those who kept insisting that it was too late, and that the court system either couldn't, or wouldn't, have a trial ready to go before the election rolled around.  I so badly wanted to believe the now fewer voices who still believed justice would be done and Trump would be tried before voters had a chance to cast their ballots.  

And here we are.  Even the one case, in the State of New York, which took almost a decade to prosecute, where there was an actual trial before the election, concluding with 34 felony convictions, has been neutralized, weakened, and pushed off to the side, the sentencing postponed, and postponed again, now not to occur until weeks after the election is over.  

And so, all of those who were once ridiculed and criticized for not believing in our justice system, for being critical of a Democratic-appointed Attorney General, for not believing that the system was powerful enough to endure, as it was intended, in spite of human error, to work on behalf of the people, have been vindicated.  

The system is broken.  Justice, in America, is dead.  

Oh, for those among our population who do not have the means to buy their way out of trouble, and who do not have the political power to threaten careers and threaten to jail people who are working to bring about true justice, we still must face the consequences of crimes we commit, and we still must pay the cost for the system, regardless of its effectiveness on our behalf.  In light of what is now happening, I don't know if that can actually be called "justice."  We must bear the brunt of the corruption of justice.  

And I must also ask, where's the outrage over this?  I'm not hearing much.  It's as if, collectively, we, the people of the United States have so widely accepted this corruption that it comes as a matter of course, no surprise, no demands for accountability, nothing.  

When Democratic Presidential nominee and Vice-President Kamala Harris started her campaign for the Presidency, she reminded us that she is a prosecutor, and as such, she knows Donald Trump's type.  I have no doubt of that.  However, we appear to be at a point in all of what is going on that her ability to identify Trump's type has come at a time that is too late to save justice from a fall.   

I really want to know what is going on, and what has caused this total collapse of will and the commitment to justice represented by those people who put their lives on the line to protect it?  Is it some kind of threat to the safety of those involved, and for their families?  Or is it money, from billionaire friends of Trump, worth putting in to see what it can buy, in order to protect their interests by putting him back in the White House?  Or is it a combination of all of those things?  

I don't know the answers to those questions, though I have my own suspicions and guesses.  But what I do know, is that not only have we seen the death of justice in America, we have also seen the death of the free press.  It's happened right in front of us.  They've been reporting all of this collapse and outrage as if it were just routine, no more sensational than the liquor store down the street getting robbed for the fifth time.  And today's news programs were sickening drivel, inconsequential babble and driven by the ignorance of people who call themselves "journalists."  

The New York Times puts its motto on its pages, "Democracy dies in darkness."  Well, people, the sun has gone down fast, and we are in the last moments of twilight for our Democracy.  It's been left up to us.