TOLLING BELLS

      I cannot speak for others, only for myself, but surely there are people out there who also hear the toll of the bell. The knelling of those bells speaks loudly, clearly, and yet, there remains a thick cloud of smothering deafness over this country.

For five years the entire country has been laughing and shocked at the antics, craziness, and moronic behavior of the president of this country, the same man who lost the popular vote to Hilary by over 3 million. The same man who seeks to deny that his most recent opponent won both the electoral votes, by a large margin, and also the popular vote by over 7 million. As the ruinous years under his awful reign went on, the truth, though, came out, and those who understood the end plan of this man and his cohorts, stopped laughing, began to wring hands and finally, finally, too little , too late, began to speak up.

A new language arose, straight from the dystopian society books of Brave New World and 1984. the shocking world presented by Roth's book The Plot Against America became ever so real and realistic and if you have not seen the HBO presentation of it, do see it. Trumpism. Trumpian. Trump-like. Trumpsplaining and splainers. And the sheer back bending to accommodate this man and his twisted thinking - if one can use thought in conjunction with Trump in the same sentence - well, my bones hurt at the sight, the hearing of, the reading about, the loss of backbone by the GOP as they catered to the lowest ranks of society, as they allowed the dregs of that society to rise to the top, as cronyism, greed, corruption, power seeking and maintenance, manipulation, all the negative verbs and actions, became the favored acts of the day.

So most of us were greatly relieved when he lost the election. Perhaps we were now to have the chance to restore the ideas of the true America. Liberty and responsibility. Care and concern for others. The enabling of dreams. The welcoming of immigrants and the renewal of a humane policy, no more stolen children!. We hoped we could undo the damages he has inflicted upon the environment, the sheer existentialist danger he has wrought upon the face of this country and the world.

How wrong I was, how hopelessly naive I was. How , perhaps hopelessly, how deeply, we are mired in the filthy swamp of his making, along with the disgusting complicity of the GOP. One by one, all the mannikins of the GOP drank the Kool-Aid, succumbed to the twisted siren song of a world where they maintained their presumed offices and power, even as they tossed that power over to the executive branch of the government, as they packed the federal benches with corrupt, disqualified members of the bar, condemned by the ABA. As we began to be ruled by Executive Orders, no more legislative voting possible, as the country was riven by a deep divide, by red/blue division, by the forgetting of the credo of America, of the unity to be found in our very name.

The worst blow is still unfolding. For the first time in our history, worse than any other previous election, even that of the Civil War time, we are in absolute danger of throwing away our country, of hearing no whispers any longer, but shouting of, rebellion, of civil war, of arming and protesting in the streets with those arms, of a deep and bitter division within this country that has thinking people wondering, terrified, fraught with horror at the very thought that we could be the end of the best governmental and philosophical experiment ever done on this earth. And here we are, throwing it away in our arrogance, in our apathy, in our cowardice, in our inability to see either the forest or the trees. For our willful blindness, morally vacant behavior.

And it never stops. An entire huge segment of the population has fallen under the mass illusion and hysteria of those who refuse to give up the best years of their lives, - and the worst of ours -  as McConnell, McCarthy, and others, the legislative members of the GOP,  refuse to admit their candidate lost, that Biden will be #46, that the people have spoken. Just yesterday they  refused to pass a resolution stating that very same statement, that Biden was to be inaugurated in January. Sheer and open defiance of the facts, of the truth, of the very core of America.

The man himself is soliciting rebellion, seeking to overturn the Constitution, suborning treason, and yes, that is what it is. He has enabled corruption to smother this country with moral sludge, so sad, so frightening, so awful, and so unfathomable, as so many have taken up his cudgels of hatred, of inefficiency and incapability, of corruption and lack of concern, for the tunnel vision of bottom line society. Worst of all is the fact of how many and willing are the people to pick up those same  lines of violence and lack of independent thought, of automaton behavior, and beat this country to death.

Yesterday the man himself, so dangerously demented,  trumped his own Trumpian behavior, demonstrated his hubris, as he tried to cover up for his multiple errors as he refused to buy more doses offered by Pfizer, the same company which refused federal funds as they raced to find a vaccine. He lost his bet on that one, and in his pettiness, his moodiness, his toddler temper tantrums, his lack of caring and concern for others, for recognition of the truths of life, refused those offers. Now we are sunk. Now we are way back in the line, watching as Britain opens their own mass vaccination program, as we stand and watch, sitting on our thumbs, or his thumb of his rather small hands, and rotate, So his answer to his mess? An Executive Order to the world to put "America First" in the vaccination protocol. The man is crazed. The man stands right alongside the mad dictators of world history. Shamefully, too many of our countrymen stand alongside him as well. Still.

The leadership vacuum of this country over the past four years has deeply harmed us, cut into our very foundations. Now we have a negotiator, a mediator, a man of calm, of bipartisanship, a man attached to reality, G-d willing, and American minds reopening, ears hearing again, eyes seeing again, thinking becoming an approved action once more. With a great deal of effort we can blockade all those erroneous and dangerous paths of the past four years, of the threatening vistas they present, and follow the right paths, the ones not taken under Trump and his evil, yes, evil, cohorts.

Perhaps when the bells ring out on Jan. 20, 2021, it will be a joyful sound, one signaling a new and hopeful era, one to be filled with hard work and hard times, but with light at the end of that tunnel, with a return to a proud and reformed America as the prize. As I head off now to get some concrete in my spine to fix some fractures, hopefully, we can inject some moral concrete into the moral spines of those so sadly lacking it over these past four years.