It has been said that one must live a life looking forward, to the tomorrows, but can only understand it by looking backwards. Only then, it is felt, that one can understand where one has been, how one got to be there, in the place they are, and how to make the morrows a better place to inhabit. That is a manifestly difficult thing to do, especially honestly, facing the truth and the facts.
We are at such a stage now here in America. There is a difficult ( to put it mildly) man at the helm right now but it is more than that. He is a danger to us all, an existential threat to our lives of tomorrow and all the morrows that follow. He has succeeded in changing the meaning and directions of our past, yet has managed to continue to fool people, and be a personal wrecker of the world.
The more signs there are, the more signs we ignore. He had the ugliest, yet truthful, picture taken the other day and it looks even worse in black and white, the known euphemism for the plain unvarnished truth. His crazed hair was blown off his face and from underneath appeared a weird mask, a yellow/orange mask, an ugly face, and one that exposed the ugliness and the faslehoods underneath. It is as if the portrait of Dorian Gray emerged from the attic and was exposed to the world as Donald J. Trump.
The evil, yes, evil, qualities he has are the very ones he tries to pass off on to others and his pettiness and downright nastiness are ugly to the vision and the soul. He has taken his misdeeds for goodness and vindictiveness as his right. He wishes to take away social security, medical care, safety nets, pre existing coverage, and all things that are good, befriending and championing all that is evil, that is greed, that is selfish. This is not a leader for the present, let alone for the past of our country and its values, and certainly not for our future and the future of the world.
Yet he has cowed the Senators, won over and patronized the haters and bigots of the country and the world, abandoned allies for his own good, not the good of our nation, and cynically planning his 2020 campaign, using the State of the Union as a crude and rude rally, straining the dignity and our history beyond all repair. He has divided the country such as not has been seen since theCivil War and the Vietnam War. Nor is the cure and the healing necessary even in sight nor in the realm of possibility at this point.
WE have allowed all the wrong things to surface from our past and allowed it to poison our present. WE have allowed a cruel and selfish man to run rampant over us all, to split friends and families, to have imposed self censorhip on our speech so as to not create difference, or possibilities of vioence. What have we done? We have allowed cracks in the firmaments of the world, in our country, and threatened our future.
It is a long slog back to a point of safety, a point from whence we can win and find our path back to the future that is supposed to be, the one tht matches the road taken by our past, by our Founders, by our Constitution, by the dreams, the sweat, the blood that has gone to gain and preserve it for all time. The country that welcomes new blood and new ideas. The country that welcomes diversity. The country that welcomes all religions. The country that does not espouse hatred. The country that does not blow up monuments in order to build a dangerous and unnecessary wall of division.
Our future and the future of our grandchildren and great grandchildren are waiting. Which way will we go? What will we leave for them? Will it be a land divested of all that is good, that is right,that is healthy, that recognizes the true needs of society and achieves them? It is up to us. Look to the past for lessons, read the future possibilities written in the present and build that future that we need, that we earn, that is right.
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