Why Trump won’t be Re-elected

Pain And Politics

We need to stop listening to the drums pounding a steady beat across the airwaves — their messages are known, cataloged, and expected to be acted upon. Let’s do something different.

People make choices based on current needs and emotions. Which often results in pain, driving change.

Leaving an unhappy marriage. A job that sucks the life out of you. A government that is non-responsive to the average citizen. All of these warrant action.

But too often it’s just action. Not logic. Not reason. Not the contemplation of an ideal circumstance. Just raw and blind action that hopefully moves them forcibly away from whatever is tormenting them, emotionally or physically.

Trump’s election in 2016 was a pain driven response. People were (and are) fed up with the status quo in Washington.

As a result, we are in the mess we are in, not because Trump was elected, but because those who were already in office, running this country, had already been co-opted by vested interests, personal gain and religious convictions guiding us away from democracy and towards something we are not even sure of yet.

For all intents and purposes, Trump is not a person. He doesn’t represent any party or point of view. He wasn’t voted in because of who he is. He is a political symbol. An avatar in the game of Politics that has run amuck. At one time an idea or simply a physical reaction to the status quo and a growing sense of despondency and isolation that went on for too long.

The only reason things have gotten this bad or this good, depending on your point of view, is because the conditions were right for someone like Trump to be put in charge. A Perfect Political Storm of lingering incompetent partisanship meeting a man whose love affair with history’s tyrants got him believing that he could accomplish anything he wanted to, just by daring someone, anyone to stop him.

A DISCONNECTION

Trump has become a motivating force for change, but not the kind anyone was looking for.

We elected a Fox to drive the long-haul chicken truck and now all our chickens are going missing. Surprised? Why? This is what he does.

Trump is acting exactly like he always has. He is doing nothing different, nothing unique, nothing out of character. We elected a fox and because he wore an Armani suit, and we thought he would be something different, better.

We were fooled into believing that the light coming out the end of the tunnel was the light of change. When in fact, it was the 12:15 Express from New York City and it hasn’t stopped moving through our consciousness since January 2017.

Politics was used to run the country. It was a system put in place to pull the levers of government in a somewhat productive and expedient manner. It wasn’t perfect — far from it, most of the time — but it was serviceable. Then it started to disconnect from its purpose. That’s a genteel way of saying it was corrupted.

Like an operating system that fancied itself more important than the machine it was running, politics took on a life on its own. Like, Hal in Space Odyssey, with an emerging sense of survival, not as a tool of democracy, but as a separate entity longing to be in charge.

Politics is disconnecting from its primary role in running the country and is now assuming a new role, to exist on its own as an agent of change for those that fund it, influence it and direct it to do its bidding.

AN EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION

Politics is evolving into something different, even for America. It’s hard to pin down exactly when politics got this ugly, but ever since the Citizens United case came through the Supreme Court with a wink and a nod, things have gone rapidly downhill.

When bad ideas sit in the back of smoke-filled rooms and fester among old men with nothing but bad taste and bad stories to tell, the world moves on and society can be maintained for another day. Bring those same ideas into the light of day. Haul up their flag alongside our Stars and Stripes and fund them with staggering sums of money that could tempt even St. Peter himself and you have a disaster, taxiing down the runway, ready for takeoff. Which is where we find ourselves now.

Hyperbole aside, the shit has been hitting the fan for years. American highways from the 1920s had less potholes than they do today. Bridges that carry millions of people every day, groan, not so much from the direction America is going in, but from the weight of despair and neglect.

Our Senate runs like an overindulged frat house with bills vitally needed being turned into paper airplanes floated above the members, in a sign of complete disrespect and unaccountability for that once august chamber.

The Black Lives Matter movement ignited the gases hovering above the decay that has been going on for decades. Will it burn out or is it just the beginning of a less gentle change that has been a long time coming?

THE ELECTION DIRECTION

The Global Pandemic has softened America and other countries around that world, like the steady carpet bombing of cities in years past. We are all shell-shocked and numb by the numbers, the indifference, the lack of any coordinated effort by those in charge, especially here in America, and are wondering, long and hard, what is going on and what will it take for it to stop?

Those that dared to be different in 2016, mostly because they were tired and disappointed and distrustful of what was considered normal in Washington DC, have now witnessed the cure for that disease for almost four years and there’s little doubt that another four-year course of treatment is not going to happen.

In addition to observing one man trying to personally dismantle the constitution, we have had a front row seat to the shit show that displays both sides of the aisle in mock reconstruction of gladiatorial combat where no one ever gets hurt, except those who are paying dearly to watch it.

We need to stop listening to the drums pounding a steady beat across the air waves — their messages are known, cataloged and expected to be acted upon. Let’s do something different.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. — Plato

We must vote. We must allow the unfettered and uncompromised access to the polls by ever single citizen in America. We must look past Trump’s rants of mail fraud and see what is actually being said: He is afraid Americans will have their say, see him for what he is and does and vote him out. We must be vigilant and look between the words. Ignore the message, see the intent.

Call it wishful thinking, call it blind faith. Call it the day of reckoning or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, it doesn’t matter. America is known for being innovative. It is known for being generous of heart and spirit. It is known for great sacrifice and friendly shores. But it has never been known for being the land of the stupid or the twice-fooled.

We make mistakes, sure. Both big and small. But we learn from them — eventually. But Trump years are like dog years. We have just lived through the equivalent of 25 years of madness and ego thumping the likes of which have never been seen outside of Hollywood movies or Europe in the 1930s.

I think we’re done. The loss of loved ones while our leaders prance onstage like a troupe of idiots has done great damage to us all. The loss of prestige can be replenished. The loss of jobs can be made right over time.

But the loss of hope, being purposefully drained away by politicians who work for those hiding in the shadows, cannot go unchallenged.

Come November 3rd, we need to regroup. Collect our shit, square our shoulders, fix our gaze on what needs to be done and do the right thing.