Another Sign of the Times

Lisa Britt yesterday,
photographed by Juli Leonard
Raleigh News and Observer

“As long as we all stick together we’ll all be fine, because they don’t have anything on us.”

--What Leslie McCrae Dowless allegedly told his team of women absentee-ballot harvesters in Bladen County, his paid workers who were under active investigation at the time, at a meeting he called at his house, according to testimony by Lisa Britt, one of Dowless's ballot-harvesters who also happens to be his step-daughter.

There are moments in human history when someone utters words that bam! identify a disturbance in The Force, a moment of inutterable crisis. I'm not talking the personal crisis engulfing McCrae Dowless right now. I'm talking cultural crisis, national crisis. I'm talking a moment in human history. Ours -- so perfectly expressed by McCrae Dowless -- is the moment we totally know we're fucked because we can't trust our leader. “As long as we all stick together…" will soon and inevitably become "every man/woman for him/herself." "Because they don't have anything on us" is the rock bottom of our moral vacuum. "What's in it for me?" and "what can I get away with?" ends you here, at the tomb of civic faith. 

"For the love of money is the root of all evils." Personal aggrandisement really is the original sin of our Age (and of many ages), but even cherished step-daughters can eventually pull away.