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Kevin Ritchie is a retired teacher and administrator at Lee Academy, a hack carpenter, and former co-owner of the Springfield Fairgrounds.
I’ve been a Democrat since the late ‘70s. “My” Democratic Party apparatus — national, state, county — is, I believe, so rattled, so inured to the past, so scared of change, so confused about itself, so hand-wringing and so disorganized that “we” can’t win at cribbage, let alone win an election. What’s a rural Maine boy to do? First, complain about all of us regular Americans.
To Democrats: First, focus on the big stuff: living-wage jobs, affordable (not free) education and training, affordable (not free) health care, affordable (not free) housing and childcare, and not the culture war issues.
Second, regulate — and deregulate — intelligently; we need business and business needs us. The northern three-quarters of our state should not be this impoverished and everybody should have skin in the game with no handouts.
Third, when we Democrats get all self righteous, and proud of our big brains and “open” minds, and we proudly say that all MAGA-conservative ideas and MAGA-conservative media and patriotism and guns and cutting the national debt and state budget are stupid and wrong and simple-minded, well, I think we just confirm that we’re arrogant, ignorant, out-of-touch, self-centered and judgmental snobs and elitists. Just like the right says we are.
To MAGA/Republicans: Number one, stop choosing “I’m-greedy-I-got-mine-you-get-yours-and-society-be-damned.” We need fair and sufficient taxes and efficient services that align with a modern powerhouse of a nation-state and the needs of its diverse citizenry. Oops! Can’t say ” D” or “E” or “I” or I’ll get called a libtard snowflake sissy.
Second, fix the money-laden election system and make the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. The recently passed federal tax cut and spending bill protects capital, not people. The tax cuts are crumbs for us in the working and middle classes, and, I believe, a way to make us poor and desperate, cutting the legs out from under any initiative we have to re-take our democracy from the autocratic clampdown that holds our federal “leadership” in the existential fear of physical harm — or, of “being primaried.”
Third, loosen your grip on the “culture wars” — listen and compromise. Doing so equates to democracy and neighborliness and citizenship.
Fourth: When you cry out, “fake news!” it just shows to me that you’re hunkered in a tightly monitored, info-safety bubble and you’re not seeing real, standards-based journalism and news.
To us all: We’ve let the rich and powerful divide us into red and blue sheep, out to pasture. While we eat dry grass from our barren salad, they pat our heads, try to wreck our Social Security and Medicare, gut education, consolidate power, cut Meals-On-Wheels, some even sidle up to fascists and autocrats, and steal us off the streets. No more.
Trust good, online fact-checkers and media truth-tellers like Ad Fontes media bias chart and learn the difference between opinion and news, analysis and news, “looks-like-news” and “is-news,” which are sometimes mashed together, so the media can mine gold from us. Watch and read media from “the other side” of your/our ideological world.
I believe we Americans are currently eating our country because we won’t leave each other alone. Slip out from under the utterly rigid devotion to your/our personal purported morals and ethics and we’ll remember that others, different from us, rightfully live here, too.
In 2022, I ran for the state Legislature, in the heart of eastern interior Maine. I was beaten, but not before my friends and fellow citizens told me too many times: “I like what you say. If you were a Republican, I’d vote for you.” Huh?
While we’re fighting each other, money and power is flowing upward, the gates are closing, and only the wealthy are winning. And they may be looking down and mocking us. Venice, anyone?
The skewed Trump tax cuts, Nancy Pelosi’s alleged insider trading, Project 2025’s dismantling of the rule of law and our beloved Constitution — watch and react to what they do, not what they say.
A suggestion: This week, find somebody in the other pasture (take salad dressing) and go talk politics — and listen. Especially, listen. Really listen.
