Greta

I listen to the young lady, Greta Thunberg, and I think, wow, you got it right. You are righteously angry, and for all the right, righteous reasons. You are looking power in the eyes, and speaking truth.  But then what?  Are the people listening? Or are the people dividing themselves into their respective warring camps, and then muttering or shouting to their own, “Psshahhh, methinks she babbles on . . . she’s autistic you know. . . she knows not whereof she speaks.” And then Fox News kicks in, and the idiot malenfants of the Faux News Network begin their mindless babbling about how awful are these people.

And when it is all over, when the young lady’s prophecy about this being another species extinction begins to come true, those remaining behind will decry the industrialists who refused to cease destroying the globe. And how it is all the fault of the Koch’s (properly pronounced Cock’s) of the world.

And, in part, they will of course be right, however useless will be their mutterings at that late stage.  But, they will have also missed a larger point, and a larger group to blame for the mass extinction of humans. That larger group will be all those folks who supported by their mutterings and by their votes, the right wing climate deniers—Trump, McConnell, and the entire republican cabal.

I still observe with great frequency people who respond to criticism of Trump with, “greatest president we have ever had . . . or, God sent Donald Trump to become our president, to restore our greatness.”

And I wonder, are these folks from another planet, and so, they can neither read, nor understand English? Or, what kind of god do these folks worship who would send to earth this psychopathic narcissist to wreak such damage on the commonweal?” Really, you think Trump was sent by god??? How pathetic is your god.

But how is any of this even possible? I realize that Hitler in the 1930s rallied the German people who had been badly wounded by the ending of World War I.  The Armistice ended the shooting, but it imposed an order on Germany that left the nation’s economy and its entire wellbeing in tatters.  The ending of that Great War, almost assured the Second World War, and assured Hitler’s rise to power.  He rose by inflaming the hatreds of thousands, millions of Germans. They became solidified and unified by hatred . . . in that case hatred of the Jews, and, for reasons I fail to understand, the gypsy’s. Simply put, they hated “the other”.

But in Trump’s case, he inflames people against its own government, and, largely, against itself. There was no catastrophic ending to a war, although many might argue that point—see Vietnam. The US, under both democrats, Clinton and Obama, was moving along ok economically.  Clinton had succeeded in reducing some of the deficits created in earlier times, with four years of his term producing surpluses. Obama was slammed by the 2008 recession, and had to increase spending while revenues declined, producing large deficits.

Trump, on the other hand, campaigned on a promise to reduce the deficits, promising at one point to eliminate the entire Federal debt. Instead, his tax cuts have led to huge federal deficits, the largest in the nation’s history, especially given the absence of a war, as in Roosevelt’s term, or a recession, as in Obama’s.  Trump’s deficits promise to continue into the foreseeable future, with no ending in sight, short of some very large policy changes in terms of tax policies.  And unlike all other presidents, Trump promised to eliminate the federal DEBT—not merely the deficits, but the entire debt itself.  Instead, he may well exceed the largest deficits in our history, outdoing even Reagan, with his ignorant Laffer Curve deficits.

But it turns out that nothing Trump says or promises can be believed. He lies at an unbelievable rate. At one count, he has already lied more than 12,000 times, more than 10 lies per day of his administration.  I have begun to define his lie-predictor. How does one know Trump is lying? Well, whenever he opens his mouth, and words come tumbling out, he is lying.

So, he is a pathological liar, he is cruel—nothing else can explain his policies towards immigrant children in which he locks them up, after separating them from their families, and allows them to die in his encampments.  He cozies up to our enemies, and may well be engaging our enemies in a scheme to defraud the American people during our elections process.  He seems to be aching for a shooting war, preferably with Iran, but it is unclear that he cares where.  He seems not to understand anything he is doing, and his antagonistic actions towards climate change and environmental protections could be purposeful, a quid pro quo towards his rich industrial supporters (see Koch’s), or born of simple stupidity.  He babbles during his speeches and his press briefings, to the point that reporters no longer seem to know how much to report. He is like a drooling idiot given the right to babble-speak in large forums.

His cruelties towards immigrants seems to know no bounds, and now seems beyond the reach of the press. It is as though we now accept that such cruelty is standard American policy and beyond the purview of the of the press.  We will and do oversee the killing of children in camps operated on a for-profit basis by Trump’s core of free-wheeling money makers. Hitler anyone???

His environmental policies now seem beyond the pale. He seems to want to return us to the bad old days of the 1950s and 1960s—smog-ridden days we thought we had resolved. He wants to eliminate protections for our national parks, protections for threatened species, all in the name of industrial development by his friends.

He has refused to yield his tax returns, so the public cannot know or understand to what extent he has and continues to cheat, and continues to reap financial rewards of being president (think emoluments clause).

His cabinet and close advisers seems like a series of chapters out of the Apprentice. He hires, he fires, or they quit in disgust.  There has perhaps never been such an unstable government in our history.

And yet, whenever he is criticized publicly, social media is filled with commentary by his supporters, who continue to love him and continue to scream at his critics.  They are the problem in America. If we fail to move aggressively on climate disaster prevention, they will be the cause, because they will continue to believe in lies. He yells FAKE NEWS whenever he is criticized, but he is the core of FAKE NEWS, and his supporters are like religious zealots who subscribe to a false religion, the religion of evil. We, Americans, are becoming part of that religion of evil. To the extent that we continue to allow Trump to exist as a free agent in the destruction of our nation, we are also to blame. We can no longer just blame Trump.

WE ARE TO BLAME.

If we don’t vote, or if we vote for Trump, then WE ARE TO BLAME for whatever happens to the country and to the world. If more children die, we are to blame.  If we enter a war, we are to blame.  Germany in 1939 was more than just Hitler. Germany was filled with citizens who supported the policies that led eventually to the deaths of millions of innocent people. They were as much to blame as Hitler.  We can no longer pretend that Trump is ok. Trump is NOT OK. He is an aberrant personality who we are allowing to continue to destroy our nation. We are violating the spirits of all the Americans who died in world wars to protect our Nation.  DO NOT FORGET THEM. They died so that we could live in peace.