By Rodger Morrow
Editor & Publisher, Beaver County Business
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There are mornings when the republic would be better off if its columnists stayed in bed.
After a week of dead children in Minnesota, assassins in the headlines, and the annual rerun of September 11, I find myself fresh out of words. Unfortunately, my trade requires me to keep producing them, so here are some fragments that remain, swept into a small pile for your inspection.
Donald Trump is not a dictator.
He is term-limited, which means that by January 21, 2029, he will be reduced to giving dinner speeches to Rotarians and signing his memoir at Costco. Dictators do not retire politely on a fixed date; they leave feet-first or not at all. Our version of tyranny comes with an expiration label and a book tour. Even in Beaver County, where we once thought DeAngelis Donuts would last forever, nothing in public life is permanent.
Democracy is not under attack.
It is merely having one of its regular fits. Americans have been declaring democracy dead since at least 1800, when Jefferson and Adams decided the other was leading the nation straight to the devil. Every few years we decide again that the nation cannot possibly survive the next election, and then it does, though usually with indigestion. Think of it as a political version of Route 65 in rush hour: exasperating, seemingly endless, yet somehow always moving again once you’ve lost hope.
We are not at war with each other unless we insist on it.
Evil exists, yes. But most of the people we label evil are just people we don’t know who happen to hold wrongheaded views about how to improve the world. It is easier to condemn a stranger as monstrous than to admit he simply has ghastly taste in solutions. If you read that and immediately muttered “Yes, but—” you might need to unplug, touch some grass, and walk the dog. Dogs, unlike partisans, rarely insist that the other side deserves hellfire. In Bridgewater, Seamus requires no political persuasion to enjoy his morning trot along the Ohio River.
We are not living in an authoritarian state.
Real authoritarians do not allow you to announce daily on X that you are living under authoritarianism, in posts that ramble on longer than a Russian novel. They confiscate your iPad and put you on a train. Our system still permits complaints in unlimited characters, which is democracy’s way of letting us shout into the void without doing much damage. It’s a luxury, like griping about PennDOT while still driving over the Vanport Bridge every day.
A word about celebrating assassinations.
It is depraved. If you find yourself applauding the death of a political opponent, you should be shown the door of polite society and handed over to your grandmother for disciplinary action. Grandmothers are the last line of defense against barbarism. (You will find them at Eat ’n Park on Saturday mornings, keeping the world in line between the smiley-face cookies and the bottomless coffee.)
Words are not violence.
If they were, the Library of Congress would be a war zone. Words deserve answers, not fists. The whole point of elections is to let ballots trump bullets. The ballot box, though less dramatic than the barricades, has the distinct advantage of letting everyone go home in time for dinner—maybe at Harold’s Inn in Hopewell, still arguing about politics over a plate of ribs.
Politics is disagreement, not destruction.
Believing in conservative or Christian positions—or liberal or secular ones—is not violence. It is simply dissent. If we cannot tell the difference, we have mistaken democracy for demolition derby.
And here is the part that bears repeating: God is still on His throne.
Which is another way of saying that the world has survived worse. If you doubt it, remember that we once elected James Buchanan and somehow lived to see Abraham Lincoln. Beaver County, for its part, has endured the loss of donut shops, steel mills, department stores, and even the occasional countywide zoning debate. It’s still here. So are we.
These are the best thoughts I can offer on short notice. They will not dazzle, but they come from the conviction that we are, somehow, going to be okay. And in politics, “okay” is about as close to paradise as anyone should expect.
