There is a Forest...Really

We are currently immersed in the glacier pace of evolving political history. It is difficult to sense the motion or be confident of the direction. However, when current events are finally viewed retrospectively, with much of the minutia filtered out, the obvious nature of what is happening will become clear, and likely in stages.

It is easy to see this when applied, for example, to something like slavery.

Slavery was a fully acceptable part of life, chronicled as an ordinary matter of fact in such illustrious publications as The Bible. Yet as society progressed the onerous and detestable nature of slavery was eventually met with anger, then sorrow for its tragedy, then regret that it ever occurred, and finally befuddlement. Today we are generally perplexed on how human beings could have felt and acted as they did.

However slavery is a low bar in illustrating this human peculiarity. The same can be applied to many less obvious things such as child labor or religious freedom. Some things we still are trying to immerge from like racism or torture.

On a less universal level the same could apply to the insane proliferation of firearms in the United States. The manic desire of those who want to maintain this insanity has pushed the response to this behavior well into the ‘anger’ zone.

With slavery this ‘anger zone’ required a horrific Civil War to move it to the sorrow, regret and befuddlement stages. Hopefully that won’t be necessary with guns, but a future generation (already living) will surely look back and say “how were they so damned stupid?”

On an even smaller scale we are currently experiencing the same evolution with the placement of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

We had two Presidential campaigns in which the vast majority of supporters for both candidates and those who like neither assumed the outcome was inevitable.  Of course it wasn’t.  However, that was a single event. Like flipping a light switch, there was an assumption that even though the color or intensity of the light emitted by the Donald was unknown, we would at least be able to see what was going on.

Not so fast. When Trump began his administration by first engaging the Press and Public with extended energy devoted to the size of his inaugural crowd, the near future should have had some clarity. It did not. Trump continued to be considered a blank slate, even by his detractors, so the view of his behavior and policies was served up to intellectual discourse. 

As Southerners engaged the Country 200 years ago in the economics of slavery instead of its repulsive reality, the critics of Donald Trump have willingly cavorted among the trees of American politics unable to see the forest that surrounds them.

Have we even begun to get to the anger stage?

Once in office, Trump began to hire the most unqualified and (as proven evident) incompetent people to assume senior positions in our Government.

He placed his completely unqualified, inexperienced, and (frankly) immature son-in-law to handle personally our Nation’s most sensitive foreign relationships, a fact that would be deemed too ridiculous for a comedy sitcom. His daughter, his caddy, his bodyguard, a cluster of bungling billionaires, and talk show personalities were all given the keys to the castle. Every American should be mouthing the words “are you kidding me?!?!”

Donald Trump campaigned showing a weird attraction to Russia generally and Vladimir Putin specifically, a nation that is careening headlong into authoritarianism. So what does he do? He puts in charge of foreign affairs a man we all saw being pinned by Putin with decorations, as if they were going steady. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

His mentally debilitating narcissism serves up wildly unhinged communications, which much of the Country turns off at the end of the day, as if it were just another reality TV show. The obvious conflicts of interest Trump has tried to make opaque fool nobody. Add to that the long list of resignations, firings, guilty pleas, indictments, foreign intrigue, and one out of every three days spent at a Florida golf club; I have to wonder how the growth of these gnarled trees can be analyzed as if each deserved stand alone scrutiny.

Just step back everyone and look at the forest. It’s really there…it’s big and it’s absurd.

People have not gotten angry enough yet and maybe they need to. It’s the first step. Perhaps that would overwhelmingly reposition Congress such that the insanity can be dealt with. Perhaps the Special Prosecutor will uncover enough indisputable evidence to throw the baggage out. Perhaps the continued meltdown of Trump will cause the rest of the Executive branch to act. Perhaps this is a four year nightmare. As one historian recently put it, regardless of what happens…“it won’t end well”.

One thing I feel for certain. There will come a time in the not too distant future when people will look back on us, who so passively watched or even supported the Trump deforestation, and ask “…how were they so damned stupid?”