The Beast Has No Teeth, We Do.

You can’t fear a beast if it has no teeth.

The beast I’m talking about is Trump. He’s loud, and he fills every room he walks into. Every morning there’s a new headline, a new threat, a new thing to be angry or afraid about. That noise isn’t an accident. It’s built to make you feel small.

But look close at the beast. A president doesn’t write the laws. He doesn’t hold the purse. He can’t pass a budget, confirm a judge, or declare a war by himself. The men who built this country put those powers in another building, on purpose. They had lived under a king, and they knew better than to hand one man the whole mouth.

So where do the teeth come from? They’re borrowed. Every bite you’ve seen came from a Congress that went along. When the people holding the check decide not to check, the beast gets to chew. When they stand up, he’s just a loud voice in a big house.

That’s why November 3rd matters. Every seat in the House is on the ballot. About a third of the Senate is too. His name isn’t on the ballot, but his teeth are. Every one of those seats is a tooth either handed back to the beast or taken out of his mouth.

Now here are our teeth. They aren’t fists. They aren’t guns, and they aren’t threats. They’re a ballot and a pencil. They’re a line at a school gym on a Tuesday morning. That’s the strongest bite a free people has ever had, and it’s the only one we need.

Fear is the beast’s best tool. A scared person stays home. A tired man stays home. A young person who thinks nothing changes stays home. Every one of them, without meaning to, hands the beast a tooth he didn’t earn.

I hear people say their one vote won’t matter. One tooth by itself doesn’t bite much either. Teeth work because they come down together, at the same moment, on the same thing. That’s what an election is: millions of small teeth closing at once.

You don’t have to love the other party to do this. You don’t have to agree with your neighbor on much of anything. You only have to understand whose job this is. It isn’t a candidate’s job, and it isn’t a pundit’s. It’s ours. The founders didn’t trust the man at the top to check himself. They trusted us to do it.

So do the plain work now, before the day comes. Check that you’re registered, because some states have cleaned their rolls and people find out too late. Know where your polling place is, since it may have moved. Find out whether your state has early voting or mail ballots, and when the deadlines fall. A tooth you can’t use on the day isn’t a tooth.

Then talk to one person. Not a crowd, just one. Someone who has given up, someone who thinks it’s all rigged, someone who’s too worn out to care. Don’t argue with them. Just remind them that the beast only bites with what we hand it.

The beast roars loudest when it can feel the bite coming. Pay attention to how loud the next three weeks get. That noise is fear, and it isn’t ours.

On November 3rd we show our teeth. We do it calm, and we do it together. Then the beast is just a big voice in a big house, the way the founders meant it to be.

You can’t fear a beast if it has no teeth. And we do.

We will show our teeth this Saturday just to show we have some.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing