Of Course We're at War
Elections have consequences.
Donald J. Trump is that kind of guy. When he doesn’t like something, there is one response — lash out. In the playground, there is always someone bigger or stronger who can teach the bully a lesson. What we’ve done is unthinkable — we’ve given a bully the world’s biggest gun. So he’s shooting it.
Trump has no compunction about hurting other people. He has lied, cheated, and broken the rules all the way to the pinnacle of power without a thought about those who have been hurt in his wake. His calculus is focused on how much he can gain, not what is best for the nation.
We have laws in place to stop people like Trump. They are part of the “checks and balances” system that has worked so well for so many years. The problem is that no one anticipated this level of intimidation and willingness to openly defy the law. For the system to work, we have to have other branches of government that are willing to reign in someone who is abusing their power. This doesn’t work now because legislators are so fearful of what Trump may do to them if they get out of line.
The result is that the oldest and most accomplished university in the country is being destroyed, Medicare is being taken away from the people who need it most, our country is in danger of being drawn into wars in the Middle East and Europe, our economy is unstable due to changing tariffs, and people are being taken off of the streets by ICE personnel with no badges and no identification. This is no longer the America that I grew up in, the country of which I was so proud.
I think the thing that bothers me the most is that there is no one willing (the phrase I should use here is “courageous enough”) to stand up for what is right because they are so scared of losing their privilege. These are some of the wealthiest and most accomplished people in our country, but there is not one actual patriot among the MAGA followers. They are happy to see laws ignored and institutions destroyed so long as they get to keep their piece of the pie. That the fear is so paralyzing is due to the vicious nature of the man at the top. Like a mafia don, they don’t dare to cross him unless they are sure they have the power to take him all the way down.
None of this should surprise us. Long ago, the psychologist Alfred Adler wrote, “we find that those people are most capable of being influenced who are most amenable to reason and logic, those whose social feeling has been least distorted. On the contrary, those who thirst for superiority and desire domination are very difficult to influence. Observation teaches us this fact every day.” Of course, reason and logic have never been important to Donald Trump.
The fact that Trump chose to enter the war against Iran has echoes of the war against Iraq after 9/11. Both illegal actions were justified by arguments that have been shown to be wrong. Iraq wasn’t behind the World Trade Center attacks, and Iran was nowhere near having a nuclear weapon. In both cases, the long-term consequences of this violence are to increase anti-US sentiment and to reduce the likelihood of world peace.
What Trump and other Washington hawks don’t seem to understand is that violence never leads to peace. It never has, and it never will. It may create such a power imbalance that opponents go underground, hiding and gaining strength for a while as the cycle of violence waits to continue, but only justice for all people will ultimately lead to peace.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
In time, things will change. It may be four years or forty or four hundred, but at some point in the future our society will move toward the justice that seems to be missing now. My naive hope for a happy ending would include some kind of retribution against Trump, but that is unlikely. He will lose agency the way all of us will as nature takes its course and his health declines. Others will take up the reins of government, and there will be movement, for better or worse. Meanwhile, many more will suffer due to his actions.
I'm also trusting it's true: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Thanks for this.
Thank you, Bob. Really well stated. I leave little space for hope; the inundation of chaos has me moving through life minute to minute, it seems. 3 years and 5 more months of this seems impossible to fathom and horrifying to think about the myriad of...things...all things...every one of the things that are being destroyed. It's both infuriating and sad that a large swath of Americans know so very little about *every person's* Constitutional rights and worse yet, do not care. Our politicians know them; they choose not to care. Very strange times.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked..."—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33."
"But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."
-Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45