Hoping for the Best, Fearing the Worst
The retired actress to whom I referred in my earlier post Republican Moderates Stand No Chance Against Trump said something that resonated with me, “I guess we’re all trying to convince ourselves that the next four years aren’t going to be as terrible as we fear. Maybe, somehow, we’ll get off easy.”
Exactly. If we extrapolate out over a four-year period from our news feeds that have hit us since Trump won the election in November, all we can see is a morass of presidential lawlessness, attacks on journalists, the mass-pardoning of insurrectionists and other friends of Trump, institutionalized racism, cuts to Social Security, a federal ban on abortion, people kicked off healthcare and dying of treatable diseases, tax cuts for billionaires, corporate greed making the lives of working Americans miserable, cabinet positions filled by Trump megadonors who are ridiculously unqualified for their positions, the end of our nation’s meager commitment to climate change mitigation, the demolition of our public education systems, etc.
My new acquaintance asked me, “This seems to be a dwindling spiral. How do you ‘undwindle’ it?” My response: “Great question. Wish I had even a reasonable answer.”
And yes, it’s possible that not too many of these horrors will come to pass. We can only hope.
As demonstrated at left, American politics is getting stranger by the hour.
We constantly hear people saying, proudly, that they’ve turned off the news, so as to preserve some level of sanity. I get that, but it’s not easy when the content is as disturbing as this.
Albert Camus lamented that the world of his time, the mid-20th Century, failed to provide “clarity and meaning.”
Even my mom, a lifelong Republican, admires Bernie Sanders. “He’s so sincere,” she says.
The cartoon here put a smile on my face, but it really could be applied to modern-day U.S. politics under Trump.
Yesterday, I had the good fortune to meet a retired Broadway actress who spent last summer in Ireland. She reports that, in many ways, the Irish are more troubled by Trump’s presence in the world than we are ourselves.
Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law Professor Emeritus (pictured at left) says,
Christian pastor John Pavlovitz is correct in what he writes here: unity is a losing concept in U.S. politics at this point in time. And it’s not just that the MAGA crowd resents educated people; we’re not too fond of them either.
At this sad point in time, it looks improbable that Donald Trump will be held accountable for having committed the most egregious crime in U.S. history.
