Dear America,
I suppose that we progressives...or liberals...or humanists if you prefer, should be getting used to bad news. I know that I have become inured to it to a large extent in that when I get up and turn on the news, I hear it but I don't really listen. Some of that may be age; I'm almost 72 and my memory isn't very good anymore either. So my inability to focus on something like news on the radio shouldn't be a surprise I suppose. But my acuity in most other respects feels undiminished and that gives me pause to think about my new passivity. I think it is just weariness, not with life in general, but with life under the new regime. That regime is not just Donald Trump. It is also his appointees, like Scott Pruitt and Betsy Devoss, both of whom have been in the process of undoing the work of past administrations directed at making America not just great, but fair. And then there is the populist populous that now seems to be approaching majority status.
The last polls I read showed that Donald Trump's popularity is at about 47%. Assuming that the independent vote splits in the same proportions as the electorate in general, that gives the next Democratic presidential nominee just 6% to work with. And with Trump and his party being in power, again making an assumption that the Republican hegemony in congress continues, the power to co-opt that bare majority constituency with tax refunds, chauvinistic blather and pap about how powerful we are in every respect as a nation, it's all a little too close to comfort. With each new debacle that Trump inflicts on us and the world, I cringe and then shrug to the thought that it is one more step to removing him as a threat to civilization, not just in the United States but world wide. This current atrocity--the seizing of people's children as the parents are deported--would have been worthy of Nazi Germany in the era of the Hitler Jungen. I don't mean that hyperbolically. The use of children for coercion of their parents is the kind of heinous policy that made the Nazi's the majority in Germany by turning the children into Nazi minions. Now, taking these children, the youngest ones in particular, is tantamount to inducement to deplore their parents as they age without them by virtue of a sense of abandonment. Young children often don't understand powerlessness, and they may well in the long run attribute their isolation from family as the doings of their parents. But Nazi parallels or no, this separation policy, purportedly now abandoned itself, continues to afflict a couple of thousand families...their children in particular.
Then compound that tragedy with Trump's alienation of the entire free world in various ways too numerous to mention, the G7 nations and NATO to mention just two international institutions that he has repulsed. For good measure, consider the persistent and intentional effort by Trump and the Republicans to undermine the Affordable Care Act--Obamacare according to them--and you see just a shred of the domestic implications of the Trump plague. Now you can add the degradation of EPA and international rules directed toward redeeming our environment, the dismantling of affirmative action, a tax "reform" law that has the effect of throwing a small bone to Trump voters while enriching Trump and his ilk in the top .1% and the steps being taken to make higher education primarily a for-profit business again of which only the affluent can afford to partake. And to top it off, Trump now gets to impose another conservative justice of the Supreme Court on us to advance the impunity with which our ruling class can exercise its de facto control of the lives of the rest of us. The list of insults to democracy goes on and on, but you get the point. It's like being bombed every day to the extent that you have to live in a bomb shelter. That's the feeling I have. I am buttressed against the outside world, which is going to Hell from my perspective. I'm living outside of it within my four walls with my wife and children, and now my grandson. It's just us in here, and much to my dismay, I am beginning to realize that I'm alright with that. I have no choice but to be. The future is up to you, America. Don't hole-up like I have. Do something.
Your friend,
Mike
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