I couldn’t bring myself to watch this year’s inauguration and from what I’ve heard about it, it was a good choice, blood pressure and all that.
I mean, that’s the next President up there on the dais in front of our Capitol building and what was there this quadrennial? A scowling vindictive narcissist telling the world:
“From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.”
The image is out of a nightmare, but we are living this one and the damages will be irreversible. Trump declared we are no longer the United States of America, we are from this day on the Corporation of Amerika.
Going forward, the amoral business interests of a rare few are the only things that matter in this government. The genuinely horrifying reality I’m struggling with is that such an ourageously self-destructive, childish attitude appears to sit well with most Americans.
What happened to us? Have we forgotten that we are a country of immigrants with loved ones and family connections to every country in the world? Weren’t we the proud leader of the world not long ago? America set the inspiration and moral standards for other countries to follow and now this?
It’s true that we have long since lost our absolute world supremacy, but we were still the cornerstone to a civil (if frazzled) global community. Now, rather than learning from our mistakes and taking a sober assessment of our Earth and the future we are inexorably moving into, we wrap ourselves in a child’s temper tantrum: “It all about me, me, me!”
How is it that so many Americans are on board with that? Have we become a nation of such scared citizens that we run into the arms of the first strongman with easy answers who comes along? Someone who pretends all our problems are the fault of others, rather than being the legacy of a string of short-sighted self-interested choices.
In these days, when the reality of global warming and biosphere destruction and social disintegration is knocking ever harder on our door, what Trump is offering America and his corporate buddies is akin to the American Indians’ Ghost Dance – a dying people’s last desperate attempt to return to better days when Earth was a cornucopia and opportunities were boundless. It didn’t work for them, and it won’t work for us or our corporate overlords now.
We have got to make it here on this living planet that We the People and our avarice are mangling beyond redemption. I know we are always supposed to end on a hopeful note, but I’m done with progressive daydreaming. We’ve handed our government over to people who have contempt for our government and want to destroy it. It’s worse, many are faith-shackled and literally want to see End Days of Earth and seem more than happy to help that along. Imagine, it’s going to be even worse than you dare imagine.
Then take a sober look at how we collectively allowed this to happen. The next two and four years could be our greatest hour, or it could be the final nail in the coffin. America, it’s your move.
Peter Miesler writes from near Durango, Colo., and hosts the blog No-VillageAtWolfCreek.blogspot.com.
