So many of us here host out of town guests, family and friends. They come from every part of the country and beyond. It is a special part of life here when we share a meal or coffee and pastries at some favorite venue with our guests. Same goes for a visit to a favorite park, foot trail or scenic overlook of mountains and ocean.

The recent visit of my “big brother,” five years older than me, was as delightful as other visits this year, until the last evening over cheese and crackers and wine. We had managed for two days to hold off on politics, even though it always lurked nearby as we talked. Then the dam broke. We argued. We got hot and bothered, our voices barely under control.

I couldn’t sleep that night, recalling his ignorant repetition of Trump lies. The pronouncement that Trump’s ICE agents had to wear masks and be unidentifiable for their personal safety. The claim that nobody was dragged out of a court room or work place. That suspected drug running boats blown up by our military just taught the drug cartels a good lesson. To hell with international law. I also heard how our sh*thole inner cities sure needed National Guard troops to finally clean up crime. And, who cares about a few rich guys sleeping with 17-year-olds?

I came away dizzy and disoriented. Of course, I thought of a dozen arguments I could have made after he left. Aren’t you worried about your grandkids’ future? What about the corrupt oil industry slowing our progress in implementing cheaper, cleaner solar and wind power? And what about the wise counsel of your church’s new pope?

How could this be the same brother who had carried me home on his back when I was five, blood pouring down on him from the nasty cut on my chin from a fall? The same one who made sure that bigger kids didn’t bully me? The one who shook me loose from juvenile delinquent pals when I was in junior high? The same one who had driven a hundred miles in 1968 to find me on my college campus, after he got word that after ROTC I had joined a pacifist group of draft resistors? But he left reassured that I was in my right mind, if not exactly very sensible.

But now here he was, one of the 37% of the public who are nearly unreachable enablers of a new American tyrant. I even accused him of being the sort of person who, if he had been alive in Europe in 1940, would have turned in Anne Frank to the police. Maybe I should have tried a little harder to apply the principles my Quaker friends have tried to teach me about civility. But in my defense, these MAGAs don’t exactly play nice either. “He started it, ma!”

I do wonder what our parents would think of us today. I remember as a child how my mother would laugh as she went off to vote, saying she was on her way to cancel her dear husband’s vote. There was little difference between an Eisenhower Republican or a Kennedy Democrat. There were plenty of problems, but the parties engaged in a good deal of negotiation and compromise over the issues of the day. The three branches of government seemed mostly coequal and corruption had to hide itself.

Now an increasingly erratic, unhinged president, full of destructive rage, dictates most everything, rubber stamped by a corrupted Supreme Court and a Congress that at the moment does not function at all. This is at a time when federal money that kept poor folks out of medical debt and able to keep food on the table is about to disappear, while the new budget contains huge rewards for the ultra wealthy. There are also billions in aid for Argentina’s right wing president, and billions for a military build up of ICE and the Border Patrol and multiple deployments of the National Guard. And now the president is trying to reward himself many millions in damages from the U.S. treasury for his pain and suffering from past government lawsuits against him.

Trump is demolishing the east wing of the White House with a wrecking ball as I write this. There are those who tell us resistance is futile, but I say there will be a reckoning. This nation began with a rebellion against a king’s corrupt, unjust authority and actions, and many of us are rising up in rebellion once again. And very soon it will sink in to those who still remain in denial that there is no big brother out there who will come to our rescue. It is up to each and every one of us to do what we can to finally put an end to this mad tyrant’s reign.

Dr. Michael Seraphinoff is a Whidbey Island resident, a former professor at Skagit Valley College and academic consultant to the International Baccalaureate Organization.