If you’re not frightened, you should be, at least so much as fear will spur you to resistance. You too can feel it, right? The sense of an ending, of not ever going back, of normalcy being not redefined or amended, but of normalcy itself being thrown into a rubbish pit. It’s not just me out here in some lonely atom of the country watching us prepare to commit national suicide because 45% of the population has found their source of perfectly expressed hatred in Donald Trump. They know exactly what he is, but they love him for his sour old man hatred of everything they hate but were always afraid to say. He is their champion because he says what they hold in their hearts. They love the sociopath in him, the pirate, the cutthroat, the ‘seducer’ of women, the killer.
In Northern Ireland I saw up close what happens when a country comes apart. When it ruptured, neighbor turned against neighbor, families disintegrated, friends became bitter enemies, roadblocks and checkpoints were set up to guard enclaves, men with guns ruled. This is America, you’ll say, coast to coast, border to border, we’re all Americans, a country blessed, the New Jerusalem, the ‘shining city on the hill’, the people who won two world wars, who killed Osama, the western light, the light of freedom. Not any more. We are instead a people so fragmented we cannot even unite to wear a mask in a pandemic, where tens of millions shrug at imprisoning children in cages and cheer on assistance from our mortal enemies to poison our elections.
You think we’re going to escape a reckoning?
I have been thinking of crazy, murderous John Brown recently and his warning, “that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood,” I have been thinking of Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb and what he said when he saw its first test blast in New Mexico. He quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” You think I’m going to say that Donald Trump is the destroyer of our world? No. This is America. Wrapped in American flags, flying Trump flags, half of us are rushing forward to destroy it and call the catastrophe freedom.
