Load the guns and square the sails. Cannonballs are truth-piercing projectiles in today’s parlance that should be crossing all the bows of those denouncing the Constitution for unitary executive power.

Elon Musk sails in and broadsides the Constitution. Donald Trump thinks he should be able to do anything he likes. Create maximum confusions. Blow all established governance out of the water. Let fascism reign.

There is a plan, well thought out. Create fog through smoke and mirrors, demonization and projection. Every single program or policy passed to broadly improve the lives of Americans is under demolition.

I will not try to refresh your memory of the complete incompetents that Trump and Musk appointed to government posts. I will not iterate the countries now deeply affected by the loss of USAID. I will ignore the deliberate refacing of American foreign policy to signal Russia that we are now on its side. I will hope for the best for American farmers and manufacturing now about to suffer from tariffs. I will pray for Canada and Mexico to hold the faith in America and make sensible reprisals.

And I will hope and pray that the Democratic Party fully steps up to the bat(s) to sound a clear and full-bodied clarion call of what is happening to the American public (that’s you, Chuck Shumer), what the future actually portends. Scare tactics often fail due to overload. We know that Trump backs down when the lion’s roar becomes too loud and potentially dangerous to avoid.

Self-image has to be preserved at all costs. What happens in America itself is irrelevant.

A nonfunctioning Congress is the cherry on the top. The “Boss” is omnipotent and will resolve all our problems. History is remarkable in how it has set up the template for subsequent autocrats to follow. American democracy is rule-based as we know, and actually is or may be the best system around for participatory democracy.

But it unfortunately doesn’t work so well for the new tech industry, whose influence and ubiquity depends on less regulation. I’ve always said it reminds us of the Wild West. The romantic allure, but that was good versus bad guys. Here some of the bad guys have learned through media skill to reverse the imagery. Consumer confidence and imperial control: Grab the money and run. Go on, grab the money and run.

In the process, we’ll have to cut out all the policies and aid that benefited and increased growth here and worldwide. Forget the state of the world. We’ve digitized the universe so the bots can swarm in and take over the controls. Sit back and relax.

Online, we’ll see the decline and fall of the American universe — add world to that.

The tech giants see progress and future in algorithmic terms, not human terms. Humans are secondary because they are fraught with limitations, contradictions, superstitions, laziness, indolence, selfishness, and the unpredictable. Oh! But ChatGPT and others will make our lives so much better in how more easily we can accomplish our objectives.

Well at this point, what are they? Tech giants see all the answers floating around us. The tap of a key, but where does that tap take us? It can and does accomplish a lot in various ways, but as a surrogate, human calculation and mind is still irrevocably linked to its personality disorders. Oooh, that’s hard. What remains human and what is appropriation and refashioning? How is it actually helping and how much is it supplanting our sensibilities, appropriating our talents to become a bot-like persona? It’s creating its own universe with its own rules, and are they the ones that will protect our soul, our divine being?

Oh, how the techies hate such associations. Too intangible, too up there somewhere forever out of reach. Oh, sure — for some, this new world will allow us the time to pursue all sorts of other creativity and connection. But the part of our being that is indelible and unique is being redirected and redesigned for strictly its own use. The tech giants now rule. Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.” Don’t look back, just keep your foot on the gas.

At my advancing years, that is not much of a threat or promise. I have no control over what my kids or their kids become. But loss of aid and income for many Americans due to Trump’s and Musk’s kleptocracy and redirection of budget cuts to their bank accounts is an atrocity! The America we knew no longer exists. Anyone opposed becomes a suspect.

It’s the crossroads, folks. It’s on all the news, the chopping blocks, the cellblocks. How will you and I unite to preserve what is sacred: Will you fight at whatever cost to preserve our constitutional freedoms? It takes a community, remember?

Alan Harris lives in Shelburne Falls.