by Dr. Jim Vickrey, PhD, JD, is a retired lawyer, published book author, and former university president who writes from Montgomery. He served in academic administration at Auburn, the University of Montevallo, and Troy University.
“[O]nce in a lifetime/ The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up/ And hope and history rhyme.” Seamus Heaney, “The Curse at Troy”
A blue wave of justice is gathering off our shore. Rising, it will soon accelerate over the continental shelf toward American soil, where I hope it will sweep away many of the accumulated injustices of the past decade.
I sense such a wave will soon be approaching American politics, in response to the earthquake of extraordinary malfeasance and misfeasance in all three branches of the federal government, beginning in 2017. I pray so, for I’m not sure that our democratic republic can tolerate much longer the level of ethical insensitivity, incompetency, inconsistency and lawlessness we are enduring from official Washington, D.C., during the terms of POTUS 45 and 47. When it crashes ashore this fall, its eddies may even establish a beachhead of renewed justice here in our beloved, but still one-party Alabama.
Since 2017, the American body politic has been stricken with one injustice after another in municipal, state, and national governments across the land, leaving political detritus everywhere one looks. Our politics has not been this divided—interpersonally, by city and state, and regionally and nationally—since the South declared war on the North 165 years ago, an act of treason that came close to splitting our nation permanently. Some of the spirit that almost led to that remains.
The injustices of the past decade, evidence of which is visible on every hand, previewed in black and white in Project 2025, include the following ten of the scores of citable examples, none of which have been adequately rebutted by Trumpers in these parts. The most obvious is an explosion of public prevarication, lying, by federal officials, led by POTUS 45 and 47, about almost everything, which is unprecedented in our history, making it impossible to believe anything emanating from his administration without corroboration—whether about the economy he cares little about or the war he started on a whim and now can’t end. It’s been accompanied by a coarsening of rhetoric that has poisoned our national discourse with execrative, excretory, sexual and violent language I’ve not heard aloud since living in the back rooms of a fraternity house at Auburn.
The second is related: the denigration of the media and attacks on the government itself and its stewards at all levels—from the local to the tripartite national government —which have left many Americans without a trustworthy (to them) source of information about current events. The third injustice, the one with the most immediate deleterious effects, is the arbitrary and irrational slashing of governmental programs without rhyme or reason. Think “DOGE,” whose unlawful work in 2025 led to the deaths of thousands of persons overseas; the endangerment of all of us from diseases, like Ebola, measles, polio and others; the unjustified firings of thousands of needed federal employees, resulting in the loss of expertise throughout the federal government (e.g., DOJ, FEMA and the national weather services); and the disruption of the entire national government—from the armed services and Social Security to Medicare and Medicaid and the air traffic control services, making me afraid to fly.
The fourth injustice is the physical attack on the face of the nation’s capital itself, including the destruction of the East Wing of the WH; the desecration of the Kennedy Rose Garden and Kennedy Center; the tasteless gilding of the Oval Office and the proposed “Arch d’Trump;” and the no-bid “repair” of the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool (now infected with algae, its multi-million -dollar repainting becoming as unglued as its author). Fifth is the trashing of the patriotic service of members of the armed forces and then their unlawful mis-deployment in foreign interventionism that he promised in 2024 he would put a stop to; and at the same time appointing incompetent leaders to head the DOD, where racial and sexual discrimination is rampant, and DOJ, where hundreds of competent lawyers have been run off, leaving military leaders and naval forces without accountability for murder on the high seas and other international crimes.
Sixth is the attack on all living presidents and several of their predecessors, except perhaps for Herbert Hoover, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson, whom he presently likes but with whom he has little in common. Seventh is the outrageously unethical, if not unlawful, self-dealing by POTUS 47 and his sons, offering historians a new catalog of money-grabbing and -grubbing schemes that make the infamous “Teapot Dome” scandal of the 1920s and other real estate crimes in our history minor in comparison.
The eighth is continuing to threaten voting in our land, even in the face of the “Save America” (a conman’s name for voter suppression) bill in Congress, all based on the unproven assertion that POTUS 45 won the 2020 presidential election (he didn’t and those persisting in that bogus belief in the face of the mountain of evidence to the contrary are bearing false witness, as the affected president has knowingly been doing for a half dozen years, because he will not accept defeat at the polls). That tells you all you need to know about his character.
The ninth injustice is what POTUS 47 has done to the well-being of America’s body politic. He’s sown disunion, mistrust and mean-spiritedness, refusing to lead in positive ways, pardoning those who attacked the Capitol and Congress on January 6, 2021, pardoning other felons, allegedly after money passed hands, and creating fear throughout the country.
Tenth is the unChristian, unJewish, and unIslamic treatment of those unable to fight back effectively, including undocumented immigrants (many of whom are the objects of another Holocaust we have a duty to stop, just as the Germans did the first), college faculty, students, and universities, and persons dependent on federal grants and other such sources of funding. U.S. leadership in medical and scientific research is at stake.
Viewing the dedication and opening of the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, I reflected on these injustices, their absence during the Obama and Biden administrations, POTUS 47’s historically low approval ratings, and the need for a blue wave to cleanse the country so we can begin again… again.