Endings

I may just be becoming more aware of my age. Yeah, as you speed into your 80s, it’s like you’re cruising. But then, at some stage, you understand that you are now really close to the end. . So, maybe it’s that. I just have this feeling each day that I’m waiting for something to end, so that, I can get on with things—life and all that.

But maybe it isn’t just my own ending that I sense daily. Maybe it’s a bigger ending . . . the ending of everything I have known over these now 80+ plus years of life.

I remember back into the 1930’s . . . yeah I really do.  FDR and his fireside chats. Then Fiorella LaGuardia reading the Sunday comics over the radio.  Then that War thingie, you know, with Pearl Harbor, as I was turning seven.  And my uncle Billy, serving in the Seabees in the South Pacific, building air strips and buildings for our fighting troops.

And I remember vividly most of our Presidents: just think FDR, Truman, Ike, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan (ugh), Clinton, Shrub (double ugh), Barrie, and then . . . and then . . . the end. However much I really did not like Nixon and thought he really was a crook, or Reagan, who made it ok again to be a racist, most of them had some character and some moral values. Most seemed to believe in American values, especially the values conveyed in our Constitution. Some seemed to prefer blowing up things, to talking and trying to figure out how to live peacefully. The Dalai Llama keeps wandering the globe, looking for leaders who are willing to try peace, but he apparently hasn't found any yet. 

So, my life has seen periods of peace, and many periods of horror, when you thought it might never end.

But always, I believed that we were intrinsically a good people, and that somehow our leaders would find some way to make the horror end, and goodness to return. And that is what has now vanished.

This creature now inhabiting the Presidency (I would say the White House, but he seems to be spending more time at MaraLago golfing than he does in the White House governing) is pretending to be a real president. He may not drink, but he loves partying. He just knows nothing about being a president.

First and foremost, it is him. He is truly a one-man horror show. We spoke of him earlier as a Carnival Barker, a circus con-man. And he is that, but those terms really insult all carnie barkers. They may be conning you, but their cons are harmless, and even fun. Trump’s cons are deadly. They will kill people. They will destroy people in many ways.

And, unlike most of his predecessors, he actually seems not to care about the results of his words and his actions. He seems literally not to care who winds up hurt, or dead, so long as it isn’t him, or his deadly tribe.

For a while, during the election, he was a joke, and we all laughed at him. But now the joke is on us. It is said that his support is now down to 40% or less. He has many people running scared. And scared they should be, because his supporters, will soon lose their insurance and be back to no health care. And many, who thought he would bring back jobs, will learn that he has no tricks to bring back jobs in dead industries.  And that their lives are in or soon will be in the toilet . . . and that the President for whom they voted, does not care.

But it brings me to the 40% who still support him. How could that be? I can imagine that maybe 10% of the population is either so wealthy or so stupid that they really do not care either what he does. The Koch’s really don’t care whether the coal miners get new jobs. They don’t care whether you lose your health care, because they will always be able to buy theirs.

And Trump’s republican supporters who currently rule Congress? Well, guess what? They don’t care either. The republican party of Eisenhower is officially dead. In its place, you have either brain-dead creatures like Mitch McConnell, or not very smart and completely amoral fascists/anarchists of the Paul Ryan sort. He thinks he’s being oh so clever when he proposes to implement systems that throw 30 million people off health insurance, or (in his dreams) to gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Oh and let’s not forget the destruction of the American public school system in favor of vouchers.  Yeah, that’ll get us quality education—all those charter schools that do whatever the hell they like and pretend it’s education.

Where oh where, I keep asking is the republican intelligentsia?  Are they all gone fish’n? Is George Will really dead?  Where is the outrage at such terminally awful behavior, and such absurdist proposals at both state and federal levels of government (and remember, the state governments are home to some of the most awful proposals ever seen in the land).  Any thought of just relaxing and giving Trump some space seems, to me, inconceivable. And for his next trick, ladies and gentlemen, he will nuke San Francisco, just because he can.  See, it is no longer about something called “policies”.  No, now it is about sanity, and about the preservation of the American democratic system of government, and about our constitutional system of rights, none of which he seems to understand, because he cannot and will not read.  Apparently, he has never been able to read, which makes me wonder whether he ever actually attended school . . . or did daddy pay someone to show up in his name and pretend to be Donald Trump.

And I also wonder, well suppose he does something completely and obviously illegal (like he is doing now with his emoluments thing) and they actually impeach him. Well, then we get Mike Pence. Is he any better? Well, they say he is at least predictable. Yeah, and so was Hitler.  How'd that work out?

And the days go on and on, each day surpassing the last in stupid gestures out of the Drumpf, and lately, out of his republican buddies, Ryan & Co. The entire tribe is a threat to the existence of this nation.

I can only hope that groups like Indivisible, #Resist, and other such activist resistance groups will begin to swing the entire nation back to sanity. But I’m pushing on into 83, and I am no longer certain I will see that happen.

Beware America, he is just beginning to operate. He has failed at almost everything he has ever done. We are next. Pay attention. It is your life too.

The only possible path back is for everyone who is eligible to register and to VOTE. VOTE the bastards out of office. Find sane, thinking people to run for office in opposition to the creeps now in power. Remember, the Republican Party is now officially DEAD. The cretins pretending to be republican are fakes. They mean you harm. VOTE them out. There is no other plausible solution.