Like most mornings, this morning I went to the WaWa convenience store to get coffee for my wife and me. While I was putting the Splenda in my cups, two kids walked up to me and asked, “Do you mind if we interview you for a school project?”
The kids looked harmless, but I first wanted to make sure what the interview would be about. “The high price of gas,” they told me. So, I agreed, and they began to video me.
I first told them that I thought the prices were atrocious and that because I was retired and no longer commuting, the impact on me personally was not as much as it was now hurting others. They then asked me what the people could do about it. That’s when I bumped into another aspect of the America that our orange President has created.
I immediately told the kids, “We can get rid of this President.” In a non-Trumpian America I would have left it right there. What I’d said was simple enough and was certainly innocently intended. But in this new orange country that we live in, as those words came out of my mouth, my brain thought of James Comey, he of the indictment over seashells spelling out “86 47.” So, I then added, “I don’t mean violently. I only mean politically.”
Of course, I am no James Comey, and the chances that this high school video of me might make its way to the attention (such as it is) of Orange Julius himself, are as close to nil as mathematically possible. And that it might trigger some backlash against me from Trump would be even more unlikely. After all, it’s not the first time I’ve said things critical of the President. These blogs I write are not exactly love letters to the guy.
The thing is, in the years before His Orangeness graced the Oval Office, it would never have entered my mind that the federal government might come down on me because I’d said something that might be misinterpreted as a threat. But today it did. And that’s terrible.
Suppression of free speech does not only occur when the government punishes people for something they have said. That suppression is more insidious when it prevents people from saying things in the first place. In a very small way, I felt that insidious suppression this morning.
At least I was willing to agree to the interview. I wonder how many others refused and out of those refusals I wonder how many of them were influenced by fear of retribution. I’m willing to bet that there were more of those now than there would have been before this country turned orange.
And in the end that could be even more terrible than the price of gas.
We were right 