Now I think I know what Cassandra felt like as she warned Troy of the destruction on its way. For months I have written re Trump and how bad he is, what a danger he is, what a rude and crude man he is and how incompetent and mentally ill. Impeachment. Not my president. Sounded extreme, I was told, take it down, show respect and yet what do we have now and this is one time when I wish I would have been proven wrong. Even the chickens of society, the CEOs who are perennially worried re their bottom line and tax cuts for them, deserved or not, even they have for the most part stepped up to the plate. Republican lawmakers have finally bit the bullet and named him by name as incompetent, so wrong in his statements and how ugly his beliefs.
And yet I find myself still arguing with people who revolve around the statues. It is not so much them as what they represent and what Trump mouthed off about. Nice KKK? Fine Nazi? I think the statues are wrong and the Civil War will not be forgotten because pigeons have a fewer amount of statues to roost upon. But if that is the fuss perhaps slow down the removal although I must say that a statue of Hitler or Himmler would not go over too well either here or in Germany! So understand where the protesters are coming from and also understand what and why the Jewish people are nervous. Been here, seen that before. No wish to return there. And for those who voted for Trump or did not vote and thus gave him an unstated vote - think atonement, think rethink, and read Paul Krugman's op - ed piece today in the Times - even Caligula comes off as better than Trump!! The qualities of Trump - his lying, his charlatanism, his impulsivity, his carelessness, his illiteracy and lack of intelligence were portrayed as other - as fearless, as truthteller when it was exactly the opposite. What you saw was what you got. So bad that people were shocked and thought it must get better; it cannot get worse! Well, think again.
But saddest of all is the despair I feel in that essay and in the essay of others. Read Leon Wieseltier ,read Nathan Englander - all on Facebook and feel that despair even as they write of the decay of values, of the quality of our leader, of the very essence of America. And they are not alone.
Where is our country? Where have all the hate mongers come from? Why do they hate so much, willing to beat the crap out of people they do not even know but who are black or Jewish or are "white traitors" in their book? All brown people are to be thrown out. Oddly enough I just picked up an item of clothing labeled Native Outsider and is that not ironic. That is how I have been feeling for some time. That is how I feel when I hear people call for my death. And for my family and for my people and for those who champion fair play and equality , protection under the law for all and that we live on one planet that is in danger.
Is it that humanity has decayed so much that we can no longer see any commonality, that we know only to return to the hatreds of yesteryear, the buried ones, the ones that live on in the dark?
Yesterday, a person told me that he is almost ready to believe that inside this man's shoes there are cloven hooves and I wonder........
It is a duty upon us to reject this man, to stop the decay and defeat the despair. We have done it before and can do it again, the only difference being that this time our ostensible leader is one of the bad, the negative, the destroyers. He needs to go - immediately and quite frankly he can resign for all I care and then we will teach Pence the proper way to be a President for all Americans. Or he can be impeached or he can be locked up in a psychiatric hospital. But in any case out he must go and if not, if we let things go by, if we refuse to recognize his evil, yes evil, then we are indeed doomed and Cassandra I have indeed become. To wait for the 2018 elections and hope people come to their senses is too late for when the Justice Department is already trying to become Big Brother via warrants and prejudice is an okay feeling now, then who knows what will be by 2018. Will there still be an America or will it be Amerika along with all those nice and fine people? Will we need another Homer somewhere down the centuries to tell the story and will we be as sung about as Camelot? Your choice.
It is heartening though that the Arts and Humanities committee have resigned en masse indicting the president for his actions or lack of action. The first letter of each paragraph of the letter spells RESIST. He is accused of equivocation, of gutting the arts, of prejudice, of hurtful rhetoric, of nuclear war threats with no diplomatic efforts or staffing , of eating away at American values and the list goes on. Yes, there is hope but we must be strong, very much so if we are to come out as the America we need to be.
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