The spoils are sliding

The Spoils Are Sliding

Almost forty years ago, when I worked at a surface coal mine, it wasn’t unusual for the spoils to slide. For those who’ve never stood beside a dragline the size of a church, here’s what that means:
To get to the coal, you first have to move mountains — literally. The overburden, all that useless dirt and rock sitting on top of the coal, is dug up and piled somewhere out of the way. But gravity, that relentless accountant of the universe, keeps the books balanced. You can only stack dirt so high and so steep before it begins to move back down. Slowly at first — inches a day, maybe less — until one morning you come to work and the entire spoil pile has crept halfway back over the coal you just uncovered. A slow-motion disaster.

The strange thing is how deceptively calm it all looks while it’s happening. You can stand there and watch a fifty-foot wall of dirt ooze forward at the speed of a glacier. If you blink, you miss it. But give it enough time and it swallows everything.

That, my friends, is what’s happening to our democracy.

Our freedoms — the hard-won layers of rights and norms that generations dug out for us — are being buried again under the slow slide of corruption, lies, and authoritarianism. The spoils are sliding.

The Trump movement, with its contempt for truth, justice, and the rule of law, is the gravity pulling it all downhill. Each day, the slope steepens a little more — a judge attacked here, a journalist smeared there, another election rule “adjusted.” And because it happens gradually, many Americans barely notice. They don’t see the slow crawl of authoritarian dirt creeping over the coal seam of liberty. They go about their lives, unaware that the thing we’re losing isn’t some abstract idea — it’s the ground beneath our feet.

History tells us that democracies rarely collapse with a bang. They erode with a shrug. Rome didn’t fall in a day, and neither did Hungary, Turkey, or Russia. Each thought they were “too strong” to fail — until the weight of apathy and propaganda buried their freedom for good.

So what’s the message?
Don’t stand there watching the slide and telling yourself it’s no big deal. Don’t believe that “it can’t happen here.” It is happening here.

The overburden is moving. The spoils are sliding.
If we don’t start digging back — voting, organizing, speaking out — the coal seam of our democracy will be gone before we realize it was ever there.

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