These three years of Trump have felt like a hideous party from my college days — one of ear-drum cracking bad music, people shouting at one another to be heard, drunks reeling about thinking they are clever, drunks guzzling Boone’s Farm wine of every sickening favor, someone crying quietly in a corner, stoners slumped upon a raggedy couch watching TV and laughing, a lonely assistant professor holding forth on politics in the kitchen to an undergraduate he’s hitting on, smoke in a layer hovering just above my head, gagging sounds coming from the bathroom, the sound of splintering beds from upstairs, and 4 or 5 loud mouthed, beer-chunked, frat-boy assholes yelling about how tough they are, who begin removing their shirts, and then in throwing wild punches.
Except that instead of a one night’s party gone bad, we have a nation being torn to pieces over the last 3 years. The rest of that long metaphor pretty well applies.
Except that I could and can walk away from the party and for now, it will not pursue me.
A few weeks ago a friend said to me, “How have all of Trump’s actions affected you? I mean really affected you? You’re doing fine right?”
I have been thinking about that question and how to answer it honestly.
I am retired from my career, owe money on a mortgage but do not have an enormous monthly bill, receive a pension and social security and medicare and am healthy enough to still work part-time at a job that requires lots of energy. I live in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States as measured by per capita income. I am a 67 year old white male and therefore do not bear a daily load of anxiety about being pulled over by a police officer or followed in a store because I am the wrong color or stalked or harassed by sexual predators because I am the wrong gender. I do not spend any time looking out my window waiting for ICE to show up. No one is hunting me. I am not being facetious or flip.
The grocery stores where I shop are brightly lit and clean and stocked with more variety of food and goods than I could list. My old car runs. I can afford a mechanic when it breaks down. I can pay my bills. My well water is clean, my neighborhood safe, there are lots of parks nearby. If I chose to do so, if I chose to stop reading*, Trump’s monstrous noise and his daily aggressions would pass above me. I am a college educated, old white male Boomer, and temporarily, I have been granted immunity from the consequences of Trump’s crimes.
Of course, there is a list of those who have not been granted that immunity: every person of color who has been vilified as living in “shithole countries” or in inner city communities or who has been the target of Trump’s xenophobic and white supremacist immigration policies; children torn from their parents and kenneled like dogs in private prisons across the country; the poor denied medical care by States following Trump’s cut in Medicaid funding; women everywhere awaiting the hammer blow from reactionary judges on abortion and birth control access; wildlife and wild places, everywhere; our democratic allies, undercut and uncertain of our position regarding common adversaries as Trump plays respectful host to tyrant after tyrant; members of the armed forces who watch as he pardons soldiers accused of war crimes, charges brought by menbers of their own services.This is only a partial accounting.
As is the case with millions of others, I have seen the hourly damage he does to the long term well being of the country as a whole. One must willingly choose the blindness of the cult member and a moral lobotomy not to see such things.
However, that is part of the problem for many besides myself — the cleavage between what they read and see on a screen and what is happening in their own lives, the wild disparity between the material effects of Trumpism and its battering emotional and moral effects, between the tremendous damage you see being done to the ideals of truth, dignity, beauty, democracy, humility, common sense, human decency, fundamental kindness and the surreal normalcy of ordinary life. You know something catastrophic is on its way. All the warning flags are up and you can hear the wind beginning to scream, but it has not yet struck and you’re not sure what forms it will take when it does. So instead, we wake up each day in a weird suspension of effect. The sun is still shining but ….
In the miasma of the periodic hopelessness I feel, political solutions to Trumpism seem impossible. While Republican leaders are desirous of tyranny and wielders of all manner of political savagery, Democrats are fantasists. They dream of universal relief, universal nurturing, universal peace: Medicare for All, relief of student debt, a Green New deal of massive infrastructure projects and a restructuring of economies, an end to wars, an attack on corporate hegemony and monopoly that would amount to a revolutionary shift in how our economy produces wealth and jobs, a restructuring of the tax code to eliminate the grotesque inequality between capital and workers. I am sympathetic to all of these as both an articulation of crises to be addressed and as policy goals for legislative action.
My problem is, I have no idea how they will deliver on these promises. Where will the political will and sustained planning necessary to pass legislation come from? How will a Democratic President balance his or her elaborate plans against a fiscal cupboard stripped bare by Republicans in service to the 1%?
Many of the Democrats running for President seem not to have figured out how to speak like ordinary human beings and instead pile up entire continents of plans and policies when Trump, and Obama before him, have reinforced how political choices are primarily emotional and visceral. Nail down 3 or 4 crucial things you wish to do as President and hit them again and again. Find someone to teach you how to avoid lecturing an audience like the well intentioned but pompous high school teachers you come off as. In addition, even after years of observing someone as ruthless as Mitch McConnell and unprincipled as Lindsey Graham, please understand that the dictum “man is wolf to man” is pretty well true internally, and when applied to other nations might prompt them to think about how to protect our country and our democratic allies from the predatory depredations of States worse than us.**
This is not a plea for moderation nor a misplaced faith in Republican reformation after Trump nor a yearning for a candidate who will match my concerns. We are in deep trouble. We need sustained action on reforms to the economy, elections and voting rights and radical steps on climate change. I will work for and vote for whomever is the nominee, but I think I want a sense that all those Democrats running to be President can explain clearly the nature of the existential decisions facing us in November of 2020. I have yet to hear that clarity from any of them.
The dystopia that has already arrived for millions feels imminent for even the immune. Technology is pushing us to become more atomized. We are speeding apart from each other at light speed, the speed of tweets, of Facebook posts, of angry texts, the speed of instant communication, like galaxies in an ever expanding universe. Politically and socially, I worry that at the conclusion of this nightmare, all we will see around us will be a social darkness. We will be isolated in our perfect, deadening freedom on a planet stripped of wild places, wild animals, clean water and air, ruled by warlord oligarchs from their gated, well-fortified communities, reduced to servitude or worse.
Now I sound like some tweaker foaming out half-cracked diatribes, the crazy man you walk away from on a city street, but I suspect some of your visions are as terrible as mine, or worse.
Trump is only a messenger of a far deeper disease. Stuffed with opiods, weed, booze, our binge watching, selfie taking, celebrity worshipping, all devouring civilization, this perfect product of 21st century capitalist global culture, we have become the disease. We are a civilization driven into madness by consumerism, by the monstrous economic pressures of oligarchs, by an Olympian selfishness and self-absorbed blindness, by a deep inability to pay attention and a repellent, bone deep stupidity.
However, in places where far worse has occurred — in Yemen, Syria and China, men and women go on and fight against autocracy and cruelty of every kind. The right thing to do is always there. It is a matter of choosing to do it.
We have plenty of examples of people in this country who have not surrendered their will or spirit to despair: Dr. King, who gave his life for his belief that change and redemption were real, not chimeras; activists of every race, age and gender, Bryan Stevenson, labor leaders, Marie Yovanovitch, whistleblowers, the tribes gathered as water guardians in North Dakota, Alexander Vindman. The list is limitless.
I know of one irreducible principle, one reason for fighting — the irreducible value of life, all life, human and animal. We cannot go on without children. We cannot go on without clean air and water, without vast sanctuaries where the diversity of animal and insect life can be preserved. Both deserve to be nurtured and cherished because of their intrinsic worth and because it is in our self-interest as a species to do so.
Everyone who reads this knows children. No matter how bleak the present might be to our adult eyes, those children merit the full force of our moral and physical commitment in combating our country’s would be tyrants and their barbarism. There is no other choice to be made. 
*I cannot bear to watch TV news, wise men and women pundits, comedians, etc. When I do so, it feels as if I am witnessing the obliteration of civilization in real time. Almost all of my news comes from a dozen or so print sources. That way I can hear myself mourn, scream and fling curses into the air without being drowned out, and I can sort through many points-of-view to try and arrive at my independent appraisal.
