Donald Trump is no accident.
He is our Imperial Vulture come home to roost. Our Exceptional Karma. The ultimate incineration of a City on a Hill defined by arrogance, brutality, and greed.
Trump’s willful negligence has killed more Americans in three months than did the Vietnam War in ten years.
He’s saturated our lives with dictatorship, disease, dementia, depression.
But we have no claim to self-pity.
Pinochet (Chile), Mobutu (Congo/Zaire), the Greek Junta, the Shah (Iran), Somoza (Nicaragua), Diem/Thieu/Ky (Vietnam), Yeltsin/Putin (Russia), Pol Pot (Cambodia), Lord Jeffrey Amherst (Indigenous America), Salazar (Portugal), Marcos (the Philippines), Alvarado (Honduras), the Duvaliers (Haiti) … murderers, thieves, despots, liars, bigots, buffoons, puppets, thugs, butchers, hypocrites, clowns, torturers, mobsters, devils incarnate … all installed to serve American corporate interests.
They are Trump and he is them.
The butchery we’ve imposed on humankind and the planet has at last come home to roost. Trump is Earth’s retaliatory demon, here to ravage the remnants of a cruel, hypocritical, dying empire.
China will soon eclipse America’s once insurmountable economic dominance. Our military is an ornate, obsolete, obscene husk. We’re a downbound #2, a failing state. Trump has left us gutted, poisoned, betrayed, mocked, abused, leveled, trashed, choking in the dust (we can’t breathe!!!).
He is history’s inevitable payback.
We can’t get him gone until we fully face our nation’s stake in his epic evil.
So let’s pick a moment before November 3rd. A Trump Exorcism Day, to excoriate the pain our empire has imposed. The arrogance of our “exceptionalism.” The burden of our slave-based misogyny. The injustices of our racism, sexism, ecological destruction, multi-layered bigotries. The wages of our greed. The uselessness of our wars. The absurdity of our military. The blood-sucking death grip of our global corporations.
Wrap them all in one big irreverence. Look deep into the ghastly mirror of our merciless inflictions … then face who we really have been, and what we must become.
The Donald is no random event. He demands we confront where he really came from and all he embodies.
Only then do we get truly woke.
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I put a “Black Lives Matter” bumper sticker on my car today. Way too late, way too little, but as a therapist I have lived for 20 years with a fiduciary responsibility to put my clients’ needs first, to remain a neutral screen that allows me to connect and help deepen compassion and empathy without a political filter. Helping heal people, I thought, was my role in this challenged society.
Being a white guy in the progressive and primarily white state of Vermont probably made that a little too easy. Sure, I send checks to Rights and Democracy and Vermont Workers Center, ACLU and Greenpeace. Marched some with Migrant Justice. Nice, polite, helpful, I even wear my March for our Lives tee shirt to the gym.
But right now this country is coming apart at the seams, led by Donald Trump and his racist and ugly enablers. Republicans are looting and raping in broad daylight, emptying our pockets and our Treasury while a virus is destroying “we the people.” A virus called covid, and corruption, and racism, and hate. A virus of ignorance, poverty, fascism and drugs.
So I am out. Out as a progressive, angry as fuck radical. I walked out of school in 8th grade to protest the Vietnam war, and I was teargassed in Washington. And maybe the crazy look on my face is hidden by my mask, but I’m back and right now the country is filled with some shit I will not eat.