My wife and I have a friend in Lebanon — the country, not the Pennsylvania town — whom we’ve known since the 1970s, when Lebanon’s civil war was still being fought with frequent rocket and mortar attacks. Tony lived in Beirut, once one of the most beautiful cities in the Middle East, where rocket attacks had become as common as MAGA hats in Tennessee. Nonetheless, he urged us to visit him at his home in the Christian part of town.
“Tony,” we said. “Are you nuts? The city is under attack! We could be blown to smithereens at any second!”
“No,” he said, “all that is on the other side of town. It’s five miles away.” He said it the way a Wilmingtonian would say all the murders happen on the East Side, Wawaset Park is perfectly safe.
It’s easy for some of us to take that attitude towards the Trumping of America. You’re probably not foreign-born, so ICE is not an existential threat. You probably aren’t directly affected by the targeted tariffs, unless you grow soybeans, and even then you’re in line for a buy-off. Life seems more menacing if you’re gay or trans, but not in ways most people notice. Basically, all the bad stuff is happening across town.
So back to Tony. Two years after he invited us to visit, his family was living in the stairwell of a bombed-out apartment building. (Don’t worry, they all made it through just fine, and still live in Beirut.) The point being that a bad situation can get a lot worse in two years.
Nancy Pelosi might be comfortable treating this as a political matter, but she’s shirking the constitutional duty of the House by doing so. I understand the urgency of voting Trump out in 2020, but doing nothing because of the fear of public backlash is another blow against constitutional order.