By Terry Manning
“Everybody cheats.“
When my classmate said that, I felt my pulse quicken. My earlobes warmed as heat escaped the collar of my shirt.
“Not everybody,” I said.
“So you ain’t neeevvvver cheated?” a different classmate taunted.
“No,” I answered.
“You’ve done something,” another one jeered.
“Yeah,” I said. “I read the assignment, did the practice test at the end of the chapters, and went back and made notes on the questions I missed.”
They didn’t believe me. I didn’t care, because I knew that many of the ones who did believe me didn’t like me. To them, I was a nerd, or worse, an Oreo: Black on the outside but white on the inside.
See, I learned early on that sometimes people say stuff like that to cover for what they cannot do. More often, it’s to cover for things they simply don’t want to do, like some of my classmates.
And I learned that people say things like that when they just want to do bad things and pretend it doesn’t matter because “everybody does it.”
There is a longtime stance in the liberal/progressive community that every time Donald Trump or one of his supporters accuses Democrats of something, it’s because they are either doing it themselves or they plan to do it the first chance they get.
All the years of accusing Democrats of corruption, cheating, weaponizing the federal government for personal vendettas, “waste, fraud and abuse,” and godlessness never made sense to me. Not until I started asking, who is making these claims, and what are they telling about themselves? A crook thinks everybody is a crook.
So when Trump refuses to follow the law, it’s because he thinks he is above it. When he sics the Justice Department on his enemies, he says he’s just doing what was done to him. When he accepts money from people seeking his favor, he points to the “Biden crime family,” as if to say, “well they did it, so now I get to do it.”
“Waste, fraud and abuse,” the standard rationale for Trump’s systematic dismantling of the federal government, has reached new heights since his return to office. Who needs a billion-dollar ballroom? What Christian erects a gold statue to a man yet insists he isn’t idolizing that person?
And last week, we got to see how much a lot of what Republicans in the South have been saying for years was pure baloney. They blame Democrats for everything, though they have held the reins of political power across generations that have seen their states fall and stick to the bottom of rankings in every metric for quality of life.
Like their counterparts in D.C., they find every excuse not to do the right things. Gun control? “It’s too soon” or “Now is not the time,” after every mass shooting. The social safety net? “We can’t afford it” even as they grant tax breaks to big corporations seeking to dodge organized labor. They claim DEI only meant “didn’t earn it” even as they lavish high-paying jobs on family and friends.
It is maddening to me how slowly the wheels of the government turn when it comes to helping people. But hot damn, did GOP lawmakers run like their asses were on fire when they saw an opportunity to redraw congressional districts to protect themselves from an electorate increasingly opposed to their unpopular agendas.
Every critique I’ve seen so far has been met with “but look what the Democrats did in Virginia.”
Not only do they fail to mention Trump started this mess in Texas, they also fail to mention Virginia’s redistricting effort was presented to and approved by its voters — before being struck down by the state’s Supreme Court for “procedural errors.”
I wonder how that court might describe the clamor in places like Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee, where Republican lawmakers went to vote on ready-made revised electoral maps eliminating districts that improve the likelihood of Democrat and Black representation in their states? All without input from voters.
I recall the Alabama capitol reporter who told me years ago of that state’s GOP lawmakers, “They really aren’t bad people.” My response, “So why do they keep doing bad things?”
At some point the people currently in power and their supporters are going to have to admit to themselves what the rest of us already know. They are not doing these things for God, for the country, their families, or for their race.
They are doing bad things because they are bad people, and because they can.
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.