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My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

I still believe in rural America. Rural America is where I live and where I’m from.

A second Trump administration does not bode well for rural America and all of us who want Albert Lea to continue to be a viable place for future generations to live.

The Biden/Harris administration has worked relentlessly to tamp inflation back down to target levels for the past three-plus years, and the current 2.4% inflation rate is almost there. Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPs and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, major legislation that poured money into rural areas.

Lina Khan, the fearless and brilliant chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has been taking on giant corporations like Google and Amazon which dominate markets and use anti-competitive strategies that hurt small businesses and raise costs for consumers. Her work helps rural areas especially, because we are far from the urban centers into which most of that money flows. Another example is the FTC’s new rules that prevent car dealerships from adding junk fees and using bait-and-switch tactics that cost consumers an estimated $3.4 billion each year.

Billionaire tycoons do not want someone like Khan around, because she has our backs. They threw their support to Trump, and they prevailed.

My first thoughts last Wednesday morning were for the people of Ukraine. They have fought valiantly to preserve their independence and maintain their territory against Russia’s illegal war. Trump’s win hurts Ukraine and helps Putin.

As for Robert Hoffman’s imagined response of Harris supporters to Trump’s win, his predictions are outlandish and intentionally built on false premises. They are meant to deflect attention away from Trump supporters who violently attempted to help Trump throw out Biden’s victory and sabotage constitutional order on Jan. 6, 2021.

Hoffman’s assessment is clearly off-base, but it has a purpose — and not a good one. Undermining truth with a blizzard of lies until people struggle to tell fact from fiction is an authoritarian strategy for control.

Who gets the upper hand when citizens can’t sort through the noise to find good information to make informed choices? Definitely not us in rural America. It will benefit Trump and his billionaire cronies at the top.

I listened this past week to people talk about their fears for a second Trump administration. For example, what will happen if we lose the ACA and our pre-existing conditions are no longer covered by insurance? Diabetes, cancer, epilepsy, heart disease and even pregnancy — these were all ‘declinable” conditions before Obama’s ACA made it illegal for health insurance companies to charge people more for these conditions or exclude coverage for them.

Votes are still being counted, but the entire federal government is likely to be under Republican control next January. Sen. John McCain was our backstop for the ACA in 2017, and he is dead now. Who is left in the Republican party who will stand up to Trump on our behalf? Maybe no one, and we are the ones who would pay.

Republican control of Congress would also make it possible to pass a federal ban on abortion. Women are already suffering and dying (for example, 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain in Texas, who lost her baby and her own life) in a number of states as a result of Dobbs. A federal ban would supersede state laws. This is about control of women, and women would pay.

Evangelicals favored Trump by a wide margin again. I see in rural areas like ours a big disconnect between “Christian” and “Christ-like.”

The label “Christian” doesn’t reveal much on its own. It could be good, it could be neutral, it could be bad. Christ-like behavior should be the standard for assessment rather than any label.

Here is why the distinction is important: People have often done horrible things under the “Christian” label.

Men who covered their faces with white hoods to terrorize people were Christian (White Protestant, specifically). So were Nazis in the mobile killing units who shot infants in their mothers’ arms. So were slaveholders in the South who bought the chained survivors of the brutal Middle Passage at auction. So were the Catholic priests who led the inquisitions and developed sadistic methods of torture and execution.

See things for what they are. Does the behavior match the label? UnChrist-like behavior, like valorizing greed and “retribution” and apathy, brings suffering and hell on earth, even when it labels itself “Christian.”

So many voters thought they were throwing a brick at Washington. Maybe that felt good at the time, but that brick is likely going to bounce back in our faces and cause us pain.

We have a lot of hard work to do to normalize respect for all people’s basic human rights, rebuild community trust and restore rural viability.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.