Have you broken your New Year’s resolution yet? Don’t feel bad. You’ve already endured, what? Three full days — 72 hours — laboring under whatever harsh regimen you’ve imposed upon yourself?
Change is hard. We tend to revert to the person we are and have always been. Discipline sounds great, in theory. Then you get hungry ...
No shame there. I was lucky this year, in that I didn’t make any personal resolutions. What would that be? I’ve kept off most of the 30 pounds I resolved to lose in 2010, in a diet shared here. I already gave up drinking, back in 2006. One day at a time...
That doesn’t mean I didn’t make a resolution — I did, publicly, on X. (Can we stop calling it “the social media formerly known as Twitter”? Not yet?)
This is what I wrote: “I hope you’ll consider joining me in my New Year’s resolution for 2024: to end the year living in the same free and open democracy that we started in. Like all goals worth achieving, it won’t be easy, requiring continuous hard work and focus. But nothing else is more important.”
Turns out there were other Illinois personalities posting their resolutions, like failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey, now running in the GOP primary against incumbent U.S. Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.). Bailey tweeted a strange photo of himself doing a jigsaw puzzle at a table strewn with high-powered weaponry:
“I’ll be here putting together this puzzle waiting for Pritzker to knock on my door and take my guns,” he tweeted at 7:47 p.m. on Dec. 31. “I will not comply.”
He’s referring to the Illinois assault weapons ban that took effect Monday. Current owners are grandfathered in, but must register, and since Republicans hate anything that suggests collective public good — libraries, schools, vaccines — they are refusing registration as the next step of the jackboot repression of their precious selves they’re constantly conjuring then boo-hooing over. I’m surprised they wear pants in public because, you know, we’re told to.
I'll be here putting together this puzzle waiting for Pritzker to knock on my door and take my guns. I will not comply. pic.twitter.com/XpUvlkzwqK
— Darren Bailey (@DarrenBaileyIL) January 1, 2024
I considered pointing out to Bailey how he has greater worries, like his shameful panting puppy roll at the feet of a traitor. But looking at some of the now 3,000-plus replies, nearly all of them roasting Bailey alive, I didn’t have the heart to join in.
A few choice X retorts:
• “threatening a state governor while confessing what a friendless loser you are is not the flex you think it is Darren.— No one is gonna take your guns. Y’all have been crying about this for decades now. Just stop.”
• “Good grief man. Is this what you sit around and worry about?”
• “Not pictured: friends, family”
• “Bailey is the perfect modern Republican: loses by a huge margin then spend the next few years whining”
Bailey lives on a 12,000-acre farm in Clay County, in southern Illinois. Just what bogeyman is he expecting to come bursting through the door? What menace requires the weaponry at hand?
Last Wednesday I walked around Kenwood — near 47th and Woodlawn — after dark. Of course I wasn’t armed. Strolled around the neighborhood for maybe half an hour, ogling the nice houses. So Darren Bailey can’t do a jigsaw puzzle at his dining room table in his own home in Soybean, Illinois, without ... let’s see ... one, two, three, four guns within reach. While I can wander a community which, by some metrics, is considered less than safe. Unafraid, knowing that I’m probably going to be OK and was, in fact, OK.
Returning to my resolution: Preserve democracy. Everybody’s on board with that. The question is: How? I don’t think pointing out to a certain slice of the electorate that they’re dupes in thrall to a traitor will get us anywhere. That feels good, and has the benefit of being true. But it doesn’t help the situation.
My hunch, in this bright shiny 2024, is that the key is fostering forgiveness. Snap our fingers enough times, maybe they’ll emerge blinking from their waking dream. No need to browbeat them over years wasted in a cult, undermining valid elections, gagging the free press, mocking our independent justice system. Maybe they’ll shudder, like a dog shaking off water, renounce their error, slink out the back of the rally, and rejoin the land of proud, patriotic Americans living unafraid in a land of freedom. That’s a resolution worth keeping.
