Trump, Truth, and Will

I do not say Donald Trump is the new Adolph Hitler, but I’m not afraid of making comparisons between the two when appropriate. And I think the most obvious similarity between the Trump movement and the Nazi movement is in the belief of the will over the intellect. While there are many in the Trump camp capable of making cogent arguments and pointing out with clarity and facts the flaws of the Democrats and the mainstream media, the man himself is a walking fountain of untruths, bravado, and meaningless generalities. Hitler created his own brand of truth by tearing apart what generations of thinkers and institutions had struggled to create: a consensus not only of what is right and wrong, but a process through which we work to establish facts and a continually closer approximation of the truth.

Hitler tromped through the historic halls of knowledge like a bull in a china shop, intent on smashing to bits all that did not please him, willing to add new touches to classics works of art in order to make them say what he wanted them to say. Trump is not so brutal, in fact, he is not so bright as to worry about what cultural institutions have to say. He need not worry about such matters anyway because the United States he operates in today has little or nothing in the way of cultural institutions that might stand in his way. America has always been and is even more so at this moment a country of “now”. We are the present without a history, whereas Germany, especially during the rise of Hitler, was rich in tradition with strong institutions.

Nevertheless, we do have our conventions, even if the average American is not very aware of them. We have had the custom where our presidential candidates release their tax returns, but Donald Trump has sidestepped that practice. We have had the custom where presidential candidates treat each other and the office of the presidency with respect, again a practice Trump has disregarded. But Trump does not deviously seduce institutions the way Hitler did with the German Church, he simply avoids them. Trump has neither the temperament nor, frankly, the talent for such work. But while Trump does not actively pollute the existing power structures, he has effectively uprooted those practices we have long observed in our effort to make our politics something more than a naked struggle for victory at any cost. Within those discarded conventions was the implied idea that truth reigned supreme above the fray of battle that was politics, that no matter how dirty politicians were, they at least needed to give lip service to truth and the earnest search for facts.

Not so Trump. The Donald has no respect for facts, so much so that nobody really knows what his political philosophy is or what his policies are going to be. It was the political “struggle”, the will to win, that was of primary importance. The vast gaping holes in his campaign promises were papered over with words like “great”, “unbelievable”, and “bigly”. Supporters like to assume what they haven’t been told is beyond them anyway, the sort of thing only great men such as Trump are capable of understanding. Meanwhile, those who oppose him assume concentration camps and vast foreign intrigues lurk within Trump’s untold plans.

I do not believe Trump has a hidden agenda comparable to Hitler’s, but I do see the preference that Trump and his supporters have for will to triumph over truth, that simply believing something with enough force will make it so, that simply saying something loud enough will conquer competing truths, as though the title “truth” was an honor bestowed upon the winner of some physical competition.

This is the realm Trump is comfortable in, and if the use of the word does not bother you too much, that is where his genius lies.

And that is precisely the arena where those opposed to Trump have chosen to take him on. Democrats, rather than anchoring the whole political struggle in the world of observable phenomena, rather than demonstrate they have a viable alternative to the Trump movement and its approach, have elected to become little Trumps themselves. In short, they have lost their minds, and that does not bode well for the Trump resistance.

The Democrats are attempting to will Donald Trump into being a traitor to his country and a puppet of Vladimir Putin. They have abandoned a desire for fact-based arguments for ones based on the testimony of anonymous sources from agencies that have lied to the American public since their inception. Fervent Democrats are willing to believe anything, quite literally anything, that portrays Trump in a bad light. Their hatred of Donald Trump is illogical, unscientific, and worst of all, ineffectual. It is so bad that Trump supporters are quite literally laughing at them the way they would prefer to be laughing at Trump supporters, that basket of deplorables.

But nobody in the Democratic camp is laughing right now, not after the shellacking they took. Beaten though they were, however, they have yet to learn a lesson. When you get your ass handed to you, whether in a fight or in a political campaign, you do not just jump back into the fray with the same arguments and weapons you used the first time. You stop and ask yourself how the hell everything went so wrong, and you don’t try it again until you have figured it out, or else you’re going to get more of the same.

Let me humbly suggest to you part of your problem. You are fighting Trump with Trump tactics, all the while whining about how horrible Trump is for using such tactics. Your news articles have outrageous headlines screaming accusations that the articles themselves do not support. I saw today an article about a black man being stabbed with a headline saying “Black Man Lynched”. Let me humbly suggest there is a very clear distinction between the two, no matter how emotionally charged an argument is made, no matter how I am accused of being a bigot if I disagree with you. If the media you get your news from is no less shrill or unscrupulous than FOX News, you have lost the moral high ground.

Democrats have abandoned skepticism for emotional zeal. Your cause has become a religious one, with a decidedly fundamentalist tinge. You have no tolerance for those who venture to disagree with you and in that sense you have begun to resemble that which you rail against. Many of you look down on those uneducated whites with the same hatred and sense of superiority that I see in the worst of Trump supporters. If you do not see it, let me assure you that I have, and that those who support Trump and those inclined to support Trump have as well. I have heard liberals defend NAFTA by saying those who have lost their jobs should stop whining and get an education. I have seen all the cruelty, callousness, and nastiness from the right played out in the behavior of the left, with a dose of moral superiority added to the mix.

Accompanying the fear and hatred of Democrats is a feeling of total incomprehension. Only a few short months ago your biggest concern seemed to be allowing transgenders to pee where they wanted, now you’re living in a world far from the one you thought you knew. An entire segment of the population apparently has priorities that were different than yours, a substantial minority of Americans of whom you know nothing. And knowing nothing about someone permits you to project your deepest fears onto them.

Let me summarize for you: you fear, you hate, and you do not understand. In short, you are guilty of all the motivating behaviors you accuse Trump and his supporter of possessing. You have become that which you despise, with the added cherry of hypocrisy to top it off. That is why you have lost and will continue to lose.

This is not to say that there is not a lot wrong and a lot to fear from a Trump presidency, nor does it justify the hatred and fear that fuels much of it. But the answer to hatred, ignorance and fear is not to combat it with the same. Truth is a powerful weapon, but it is one that has been slowly slipping through the fingers of what we call the left here in America for a long time. Truth compromised is a broken sword. The sword of truth must be forged carefully by earnest artisans in order for it to be an effective weapon, and we have left the task to the makers of cheap trinkets.

People have lost faith in truth because its name has so long been used as a cover for marketers, advertisers, and crooked politicians. Nowhere in society today is it exhibited as it should be. It must be taken from the hands of those who abuse and sully her. It must be given a proper scrubbing and placed in an appropriate setting. Because truth in all its glory is an awesome sight to see indeed. It will rally the masses to its cause. It has no need for window dressing.

But even truth may not be enough. Will, too, may be necessary. To combat the power that is waged against truth, power may be required to defend it. But I am talking about a different kind of power than what is now being employed, what Gandhi and King called “soul power”. It is the power that comes from the conviction of one’s beliefs and the willingness to put them into practice. It is a resistance without hate, though it does require strength. It requires even more strength than physical power, because it requires you to have power not only over your enemy but also yourself. It requires loving your enemies

And there the battle is laid out for you. It is not merely a battle of intellects but a battle of power as well. You know this to be true deep within you, which is why your emotions are outstripping your reasoning. You are gearing up for battle, but you have armed yourself with the weapons of the enemy. Should you join the fray in such a manner, you will only prove that truth is insufficient and not your true motivator. You will justify by your own behavior that force alone is a fitting arbiter of justice, that truth in the end is only that which is presented most powerfully.

Humans are capable of acting according to their baser desires, or their loftier aspirations. They are motivated both by fear and by trust, by hatred and by love. You have to give them an alternative to fear, greed, and hatred. The contrast must be made so that there is no doubting what the choice is. Half-truths and words spoken in anger rather than in honesty only make it harder to see the choices we have to make. Truth must once again be placed upon the pedestal on which it belongs.

Given a clear choice, people will choose the brighter path, I firmly believe that to be true. But allow doubt to sink in, blur the lines so that no one is certain what truth or justice really is, and they will retreat into their baser natures. Even if you believed that the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was a clear one, it’s obvious that enough other people did not, people who are in different circumstances than you. One choice now is to retreat into fear, to constrict your view of the world until it only encompasses what is best for you and those most like you. You have a choice to accept hatred and irrationality to guide you, just as you have a choice to see the other as the enemy. If so, I believe the darker forces of human nature have won. To choose the narrative that there is an “us” and a “them”, to believe that there is a darkness in the souls of others you cannot touch with light, is to become part of the problem and not the solution.

The way has been set out for you, the way forward, the noble path. People such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King have shown that the answer to hatred and ignorance is not hatred and ignorance but love and understanding. Hell, two thousand years ago, the path was made quite clear. There is no mousey middle, at least not one powerful enough to oppose that which is darkest within us. The choice is war or peace, the choice is seeing others as enemies or as brothers and sisters. The choice is an all-inclusive US or a sinister and destructive belief in a THEM. In the end you must choose, because the middle ground you attempt to stake is unstable and has allowed you to slide to the opposite end than the one you allege to support. If you choose to make war against a THEM, you inevitably become that which you most despise.

Trump’s Library

If I had sufficient amounts of money—say a million dollars—what a library I would have. If I had enough money never to have to work again, what an education I could receive.

I work hard. I work hard but it is of necessity and not because I feel the need to impress others or feed my ego. I work hard to take care of myself and my family, but I have no special desire to work hard. If I had enough money to care for myself I wouldn’t work harder just to buy a gold-plated mansion.

If I had enough money that I never had to work again, perhaps I would still find reasons to work. But it wouldn’t be to build casinos or luxury hotels just so I could stick my name on them. If I didn’t have to work but still wanted to, I envision myself working at the dog shelter, maybe even a homeless shelter. Maybe I would work at the library, just to be around the books and the people who like to read them. It’s all about getting to know the world we live in, and there is still little to compare with books for doing that, especially for the money.

How many books do you think you’ll find in Trump’s home? I mean books that don’t have Trump’s face on the cover? I’m guessing there’s not even a Bible in his home, or if there is, it’s never been read. I’m willing to bet he’s never read an intelligent book in his life, certainly not since graduating from college.

Some say his smarts were learned from business dealings and real-life experiences, but that is not enough. Our founding fathers (many of them) were businessmen, but they were so much more. They were learned men capable of stringing together ideas in order to form an actual argument, not simply spewers of insults and superlatives.

Learning—book learning—is important, which is why it has been stressed in every advancing or advanced civilization in the world. It is not superfluous. Nations of poorly educated people do not advance. As for nations without a well-educated leadership, well, we shall see.

Trump’s mansions are like those of the royalty in the old world, the world our forefathers sought to escape from. Apparently, a gold toilet is needed since porcelain is unworthy of receiving The Donald’s bowel movements. Donald Trump has been given every possible advantage in this world to better himself, and yet he speaks like a fifth-grade bully. He has every possible means available to help others and he has chosen to use those means to add to the wealth that is already far more than he needs. He has the celebrity that can be used to advance worthy causes and instead he has used that fame to nourish his insatiable ego.

There is no excuse, stop trying to come up with them. Stop trying to deflect the issue by bringing up Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, or Reverend Al Sharpton. Let’s deal with one issue at a time, the most relevant one at the moment being our president’s narcissism, greed, and incompetence.

What kind of worthy leader would have done the things Donald Trump has done? George Washington would not have appeared on WWE. Abraham Lincoln would not have spent his time catering to the wealthy by building hotels for them, and Ulysses S. Grant would not have felt it a good use of his time to build casinos. Teddy Roosevelt looked far into the future and saw it was important to conserve the wonders of nature that existed in our country. Trump looks at how he can make his friends happy and gives the nation’s precious resources away to be destroyed forever.

We have—throughout the history of our country, and throughout Western civilization, and throughout every well-functioning society that ever was or will be—certain norms as to how we behave. We have certain virtues we admire and wish to promote in others, especially in our leaders and role models. Donald Trump is utterly lacking in those virtues. You may explain that Donald Trump has other talents and assets, but he is absent the ones our parents and their parents attempted to instill in us. You may appreciate Donald Trump and what he is doing, but you cannot do so and pretend that you have conservative, or Christian, or old-fashioned values.

If you support Donald Trump, you are supporting something quite different than anything we as Americans once held dear. You are divorced from the United States of America, from its history and its promise. Donald Trump is a poke in the eye not only to our Founding Fathers, but to accepted norms of behavior, good manners, respect for education and basic human decency. His presidency is an insult to the teachings of Jesus Christ, logical thinking, and the belief that the human race is capable of improving itself. You have given to a caveman the codes to our nuclear arsenal.

These are things you must take seriously. You are accountable for your behavior, for your actions. This is in your hands, it is on you, and you must live with what you have done. It’s easy to try to deny the reality of it, like a drunk denies his behavior is a problem, but everyone else can see it quite plainly. No doubt others who voted differently and think differently than you have issues of their own to be worked out, but that is not what must concern you now. You have voted for a man who is contrary to the very ideals which every civilized nation holds dear, and now you must come to grips with that.

Take a cue from Donald Trump and take a look in the mirror. Only take a discerning look. Then turn that discerning look towards the man you elected to run our nation. Use not only your own eyes but try seeing through the eyes of others, through the eyes of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Martin Luther King, Henry David Thoreau, or Mark Twain. Look through eyes from beyond this time and place, because perhaps it is the very biases of who we are now that are preventing us from seeing Donald Trump for what he is. Perhaps we are too much like him to see what an aberration he is. Perhaps egotism and greed have become cultural norms. If this is the case, and we do not do something to change it, we will soon be in for a most rude awakening.

Who Could Hillary Have Beat?

Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, which leads me to question what candidate she could have beat. Oh, I know, she got 3 million more votes than Trump, but that’s like saying the Bears gained more yards in their 21-9 loss to the Green Bay Packers. That’s the way the game is played, victory goes to whoever scores the most electoral votes rather than the popular vote. Those were the rules Hillary chose to play by.

She could have worked to change the rules if she had wanted, in the years that led up to the 2016 election. You’d have thought the Democrats might have fought for genuine majority rule after what happened in 2000, but you’d be wrong. You’d think they’d bring up the fact that many poor people and minorities were scrubbed from voting eligibility lists too, but it’s not something the Democrats worry about. They’re more concerned with going after people who vote third party because they can no longer tolerate the corruption of the two major parties. They’d rather go after those who actually believe in the issues the Democrats allegedly support rather than actually have to adopt those positions.

Besides, saying you got more votes than Trump means nothing. My dog has squeaky toys that could have got more votes in a head to head competition against Trump. His favorability rating was 37% going into the election. Now consider that the 50% of people who most dislike the candidates don’t bother to vote at all. All she needed from the other 50% was a small majority in key battleground states. Mainstream Republicans were flipping, Bernie Sanders was backing her, the media was on her side, and whatever mainstream Republican candidates may have been providing public support for Trump, you know deep in their hearts they hated his guts. Nobody could be treated the way Cruz and Rubio were and not harbor resentment and ill will towards the monkey who made a circus of the Republican Presidential Contest.

So saying you received more votes than Donald Trump is no different than me saying my bowling score was higher than the blind girl scout I was competing against: it’s not something I want to bring up. But it does raise an interesting question: Who could Hillary have beaten in the 2016 Presidential Election? After considerable thought, I have compiled a list. There is no way to prove my contentions, it is just a gut feeling. I could hire some pollsters, but if there’s one thing the 2016 election showed is they don’t have a clue. Anyway, the list of people or things that Hillary could have beat is:

·    A dead cow

·   A raccoon with rabies

·   Snidely Whiplash

·   Adolph Hitler

·   Charles Manson (with Swastika on his forehead)

·   Nickelback

·   That lady who pretended to be black

·   Milli

·   Michael Vick (puppygate era)

·   “cash me outside” girl

·   Joe Leiberman

·   Simon Barsinister

This is not to pick on Hillary. And just to show I’m not biased, I present a list of people or things that could have beat Donald Trump:

·      Charles Manson (without swastika on forehead)

·      Raccoon without rabies

·      Vanilli

·      Walter Mondale

·      Michael Dukakis

·       Duchael Mikakis

·       Grima Wormtongue

·       Michael Vick (Reformed)

·       Eddie Haskell

·         -My dog’s monkey toy with the face ripped off

Please feel free to add your own suggestions.

P.S. The cow was just sleeping, not dead. I would never post a picture of a dead cow.

Donald Trump Is A Capitalist

Donald Trump is a capitalist. I want you to remember that. Not only is he a capitalist, he has been more or less the poster boy for capitalism for pretty much my adult life, and I am no longer young. His books are best sellers, his TV show popular, and women (allegedly) let him grab them by the *****.

Donald Trump is a capitalist and we are living in a capitalist society, whatever lies capitalists may spread in order to toss the blame of their failures or misdeeds onto someone else. We are living in a capitalist society and the more we live in a capitalist society, the more capitalists will try to make you believe we are living in a socialist society in order to create a scapegoat, a villain the benevolent capitalists long to vanquish were they not so besieged by powerful and evil forces. Such is the message given by the media, which is utterly controlled by capitalists, although often the capitalist-owned media tells the story that the mainstream media is part of a socialist conspiracy. Capitalist advertising pays for programming that does not contradict the capitalist view of the world. It’s not lying or deception, it’s what capitalists call advertising and marketing.

The story is that socialists are secretly pushing a socialist agenda in The United States. Somehow these secret socialists have acquired vast amounts of power. The proof of this sinister socialist secret society is that an occasional woman with a lot of children manages to take advantage of government programs. When a corporation or a rich man does the same—that is to say, on the rare occasion when one is caught and brought to public attention—we again blame the socialists, although the logic somehow escapes me. Something about crony capitalism. Apparently when a capitalist does something wrong (and is caught), he becomes a socialist. It's all very confusing, the important thing to remember is that it’s the socialists’ fault.

Donald Trump is not a socialist. I want you to keep that in mind. Because the official story is to blame the socialists and Donald Trump is not a socialist. Not only is he not a socialist, but he has a congress that is Republican, that party that is so very fond of blaming everything that goes wrong on socialists. The judiciary too is now in the hands of the Republicans, as well as a majority of the governors’ offices and state houses. It seems that everything is Republican controlled nowadays, however the Republicans try to spin it.

So there is no longer any possible reason to blame whatever happens from here on out on socialists. We have reached the promised land, the propaganda machine has achieved its ultimate goal. Probably too well, as it turns out, as now the capitalists have no one to blame for what happens from here on out.

You see, for decades now, the forces that run our country have been busy performing a balancing act between Republicans and Democrats. With each in an approximate state of balance, blame could be assigned to either party according to which news sources you trusted and we could all agree to hate the other without upsetting the applecart. But something went horribly wrong in this last presidential election: the chosen candidate—running against a sexist, ignorant, narcissistic, orange, offensive opponent—somehow could not even muster up the votes to beat such a malodorous opponent. The game has become so unlikeable that we, the voters of the United States of America, chose to jump on a live hand grenade rather than surrender to the alternative. Yes, you may say that Hillary Clinton actually received millions more votes than Donald Trump, but who would not win millions more votes than such a sexist, ignorant, narcissistic, orange, offensive opponent?

Honestly, you have to be a pretty bad candidate to lose to Trump. Could you imagine Trump running against Eisenhower? Against Teddy Roosevelt? Lincoln? No, Trump could only exist in the pig pen that is today’s environment.

And that environment is a capitalist one. Let me review: Capitalist president, pro-capitalist congress, a Supreme court that recognizes corporations as humans, governors who want to privatize schools, media paid for by capitalists. Check, check, check, check, check, and checkmate.

Whatever happens until the next election when the powered elite are able to bring back the illusion of balance by installing more pro-capitalist Democrats in congress, let the blame rest solely on the shoulders of the capitalists. There is no other power structure strong enough to use as a scapegoat.

You cannot blame the loss of civility on socialists, cannot blame the loss of Christian values on anyone other than yourselves. Look at who you voted for. He is the epitome of all that is uncivil and immoral. This man, whose value is judged by his (perceived) net worth rather than the content of his character, is the very paradigm of capitalism.

Let the illusion of the superiority of the capitalist fall away. Let us dismiss once and for all the idea that if a man is intelligent and earnest that he is also wealthy. Let us admit that the opposite is also false, that if a man is wealthy he must be in possession of positive human attributes.

Do not forget that Donald Trump is a model of the capitalist. The traits he exhibits—the inability to tell the truth, the constant need for self-aggrandizement, the inability to ever satiate his desire for more, the unwillingness to share either wealth or the limelight—are traits that go hand in hand with capitalism. I’m not saying all capitalists are like Trump, I’m just stating that a capitalist eco-system is a welcoming one for some of the worst traits humans can have.

For decades the forces of capitalism have been marching forward. Not content with the lion’s share of the wealth of the nation or the world we all inhabit, they have been intent on total domination. They have been marching regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican has been president, but they have been doing so somewhat stealthily. They now no longer have that luxury. There is nowhere left for them to hide, no non-capitalist edifice large enough to provide cover. The makeup is off, the puppet show over. They now stand naked before us. This then, is the face of capitalism exposed.

Is this who we want educating our children? Is this who we want to take care of our environment? Do we want the capitalist deciding what books we read? Because if so The Donald will be on the cover of every one of them.

Do we want the concerns of capitalists to be the only ones expressed when it comes to what should be dumped in our lakes and streams? Do we really want capitalists to decide who should get healthcare and who should die? Do we trust them to insure worker’s get their fair share? Do we expect them to guide us into an enlightened future? We must decide these questions, because the capitalists are quite content to go it alone, confident that they are the wisest and most capable of all. Their proof is in their wealth. Just remember that Donald Trump is a capitalist.

Random Political Thoughts Part 4

I can't help thinking there are some good suggestions and observations here:

Progress is made not so much when the right politicians are elected but when the wrong politicians are forced to do the right thing by political movements. After all, politicians are whores, and it is up to us to remind them who the pimp is.

The same motivational speech a plantation owner gives to his heir he will give also to his slaves: work hard and you will be rewarded. Sage advice to the one, cynical propaganda to the other.

Money spent on barriers against others is money not spent on bridges. An efficient society is one that does not seek to place impediments in the way of natural movements, but instead directs much needed energy into channels where it can benefit society as a whole.

Since we no longer vote for the candidate we like but rather against the candidate we dislike, our ballots should reflect that. Each ballot should ask you to vote against the candidate you most dislike, the one you would least want to have run our country. In that way we could eliminate the worst possible choices, which is what we seem to have ended up with using our current system.

People should be paid according to the value they provide to society and capitalism has been a poor arbiter of worth. The people who grow our food, make our clothes, and clean our bathrooms provide real value. When we lose sight of the obvious we are lost.

A Message From Consumer Capitalists: We consider your children to be open receptacles for our messages, our products and our poisons. We will do anything to extract money from them by whatever means necessary. Usually this involves playing upon their insecurities and appealing to their basest desires. If this leaves them as moronic diabetics without morals or any prospect to free themselves from lifelong debt, we don’t care. It is not your children but our right to make a profit that is sacred to us. That is what we refer to when we talk about freedom. If we get your children in our clutches it is not us who are to blame but you for being such bad parents. Any attempt to work together to oppose us will be considered anti-American. Any questions?

The greater the discrepancy in wealth among people, the greater the need for violence to maintain it.

After his presidency, Bill Clinton looked around and asked himself what more he could do for his fellow man. His answer was to establish the Clinton Foundation. In the process, he slipped and fell into a hundred million dollars.

If you require an enemy in order to rally people to your own cause, it is you who are the problem.

The truth is the free market runs as well as a driverless car. All it knows how to do is keep the wheels spinning, but it invariably crashes after picking up a head of steam. All those who call for a free market—with the exception of the true believers—are really calling for a market they are free to direct.

The U.S has 5% of the world’s population yet consumes 66% of the world’s painkillers. I blame socialism.

The system is broken and it is foolish to believe that those who benefit from it are going to fix it.

If you went to another country to fight for my freedoms and then came back and tell me to keep quiet, you’re doing it wrong.

The world is watching, America, but like Honey Boo Boo’s family, we lack the self-awareness to understand how we are viewed.

Over 40 years after the event, The U.S. government admitted to dropping 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos. What are we doing now that will not be admitted for another forty years?

     To the degree that you transform the world, you are responsible for it. To the degree that people must live in an environment you have created, you are responsible for them. Nobody would say you are responsible to feed a stray dog, but once you allow it into your home you are to blame if it is malnourished. There are laws against abuse and neglect, though there are none against indifference to the suffering of others.

     Similarly, if you create a political or economic atmosphere in which people are forced to live, you become responsible for them. Don’t like, it? Too bad. If you want the rewards you must accept the responsibilities that go with them.

     To say that government cannot help the less fortunate among us is simply abdicating your responsibility for others. It’s an easy excuse to let yourself off the hook. Government is a tool to help correct the injustices of the world, a way to help those crushed not only by forces beyond society’s control but by forces we have created. We pretend we have something called a free market, but no business man refrains from altering it whenever the possibility presents itself. Nobody is so naïve to believe that an entrepreneur places the purity of the market conditions over his desire for profit.

So the market is skewed, the economic landscape is altered by those seeking profit. You have altered the terrain and are responsible for how your actions affect others. If you accepted your responsibility there would be no problem and no need for government intervention. But you didn’t and there is and it must.

     Government is a tool, and like any other tool it has the potential to cause damage if not used properly or abused. But a tool used properly helps us to fashion a better society. We need to become skilled in the use of government, just as you spend long hours of practicing to better use that set of golf clubs you spent too much for.

     If you think that the free market and the churches and non-profits can do the job better, then go to it. Do such a good job that we do not need a government program. But had we left things up to now in the hands of business and charities, we would have seen the end of capitalism not long after the beginning of The Great Depression. 

Random Political Thoughts Part 3

Ideas for starting discussions. Please comment whether you agree or disagree.

Freedom to a capitalist means nothing more than the freedom to make money. To them, the sound The Liberty Bell makes is cha-ching.

We don’t need politicians to speak for us unless we can first be sure that they have listened to us.

 A nation does not start a war, nor do its people clamor for one. It is those who stand to make money who push for the idea of using violence to achieve an end.

Democrats and Republicans are merely blinders on the populace intended to limit what it is able to perceive. They restrict our field of vision in order to point us towards the direction the ones who hold the whip wish us to go.

Power is freedom. To give power to another--be it a leader or an institution--in the hopes of preserving your freedom, is folly.

One who hides himself behind a flag, who justifies his self-serving behavior by calling it patriotic, is called a scoundrel. There is no word damning enough for one who hides behind soldiers.

Remember that it is the job of our president to put the interests of his nation first and that any other leader who does such a thing for his own nation is evil.

Has anyone noticed that what they say is good for the economy seldom seems to be good for people?

There is a mentality that goes something like this: “Hey, my grandparents came to America and had to work 12 hours a day in a factory at the age of 16, so should you.” No! What they did to your grandparents was horribly wrong. There was no need for people to live in misery in hopes that their children might have a chance at a better life then, there is less reason for it now.

If we do not realize the spirituality that underlies politics we will never find political solutions. All answers we come up with will be simplistic, incomplete, and eventually harmful.

The answer to the Koch brothers is not George Soros, and the answer to George Soros is not the Koch Brothers. Or Donald Trump, either. The answer to billionaires ruling our country is not different billionaires ruling our country.

The more we permit the people who own our debt to own our government, the greater the debt will grow.

What leads people to believe capitalists will take any better care of the free market than they have of the environment?

There is no freedom, only power. The only way to be free from power is to possess it. And the only way for the majority of people to be free is to learn how to share power, to make sure it never ends up concentrated in the hands of a few.

The citizens of the United States should not be held responsible for debts incurred by a government representing big banks.

Saying politicians won’t take on big banks just because they take money from them is like saying TV news doesn’t do scathing reports on pharmaceutical companies just because they’re major advertisers.

It’s time we faced it: capitalism has been a poor system for rewarding those who actually add value to society. It enriches those who destroy the environment, create violent and immoral movies and games, distract the masses from what is truly valuable in life, and pervert all that is pure and wholesome. At the same time, it leaves those who do the most valuable work—sanitation workers, food workers, those who actually create goods—with little of those things which make life worthwhile, namely leisure, education, security, happiness, self-determination, and peace. It gives children drugs when it should be giving them parents with time to spend with them, fields to play in and time to explore. It gives children power over adults, allowing them to demand from them what they have seen on TV. It promotes material possessions over spiritual values, leaving the vast majority of us perpetually unsatisfied. And feeling thus we turn to bitterness and dislike of our fellow humans, blaming them for our unhappiness because we feel we are not in control of our own lives.

People are willing to believe voter fraud exists without any proof and yet are unwilling to accept the reality of man made climate change despite the overwhelming scientific evidence.

Before we require proof of voter identification, first I think we should require proof that it is needed.

If you aren’t free now, you never will be. Be brave now or be a slave tomorrow. Be hopeful now. Love now. Vote for a tyrant and you will be a slave. Vote for hope now and you will have hope.

If we build a wall on our Southern border, it’s only a matter of time before we begin one on our Northern one. Walls do not create safety, they build prisons.

Politicians are merely actors in a play we write. Poor actors, admittedly, but still dependent on our script.

Why do people vote for politicians who say that politicians can’t be trusted? Vote for one who believes it to be a noble profession.

We can’t hope to gain control of our nation until we can first gain control of one of our political parties. 

We Are All Responsible For Donald Trump

A lot of people are angry over the election of Donald Trump. Millions are fearful and depressed. Others are actually over the moon with excitement that their chosen candidate has won. Some, who voted for Trump in a “let’s see what happens” mode, are waiting to see what is behind curtain number three. Many are already experiencing buyer’s remorse, which is typical of any voter after an election. One is never so optimistic as when buying a lottery ticket or voting. We have to be irrationally optimistic, we’d never do it otherwise.

What very few of us seem to be is reflective. Donald Trump has brought out the reflexive in all of us, we’ve taken our cue from him, so that we merely respond to stimuli rather than question how best to respond. It’s hard, when your initial impression is revulsion, to want to probe the matter further. It’s not our natural response to sniff the curdled milk a second time to figure out what made it go bad.

So instead we now live in a world we’ve suddenly come to realize we don’t understand. The world we thought we knew has hit an iceberg and sunk in front of our eyes. And yet our response to the tragedy is to stay aboard the Titanic, or else to build a ship of identical design. It’s not the ship that’s to blame, or those who were piloting it, it is the iceberg’s fault, that giant orange iceberg.

Denial is a natural response to an unpleasant reversal of fortune. When we choose denial, we shut down our intellects, from whence comes the unpleasant facts, and rely instead on emotions. Hence all the anger, the fear, the sadness. Hence all the irrational beliefs and unfounded accusations. We are like a sleeper who, while still in a dreaming state, hears his alarm clock and attempts to weave the sound into the pattern of his dreams because he does not want to go to work.

It’s time to wake up. We need to come to grips with the reality of President Trump. We have to understand it so that it will never happen again. And the first step in doing so will be to admit that Trump is not the true problem here but merely the most obvious and obnoxious symptom. Trump is the logical end of the path we have been travelling. We need to stop, look around, assess what we’re doing and where we’re going. Because when you hit the road marker that is Trump, that’s like a blinking sign that says the road’s coming to an end in 500 feet. Best hit the brakes and not worry for the moment whether or not you’ll spill your coffee or be late for an engagement.

I’m not just talking to liberals and leftists, but those who voted for Donald Trump. You too are fueled by emotions, in your case anger and hatred. If that were not the case someone would have put forth a rational reason for voting for a half-baked narcissistic sociopath, and so far I have not heard one. “Benghazi” is not a thoughtful, unemotional argument.

We have done it. We, Democrats and Republicans, and everyone on either side and those unfortunates in the middle, we have created a society in which Donald Trump was able to succeed. Not even Sodom or Gomorrah would have tolerated a man who builds gambling dens by evicting widows from their houses. We have created a society that equates the net worth of a man with his value to society. We worship wealth and fame above all else, or at least have permitted the culture we live in to create such norms.

This is not a good man, Donald Trump is not a Godly man. You conservative Christians know deep in your hearts that Trump does not represent Christian ideals. Wisdom, charity, brotherly love, a life of service, humility, faith, none of these words could ever be used to describe the person you voted for. To suggest that you voted for him because you are a Christian dirties the word and insults the One for whom your religion was named.

People who worried about a corrupt government know he is no moral beacon. You have sought to evict people who enrich themselves on the taxpayer’s dollar but have replaced them with a man whose only goal in his entire life has been enriching himself. You know that to be true.

You who call yourselves patriotic Americans, do you honestly believe I am to look at Trump and see that he was cut from the same stock as Washington and Lincoln? Whereas these men were scholars and thinkers and gentlemen, you have voted for a howler monkey in a suit and red trucker’s cap. If you voted for Donald Trump and have any degree of self-respect, you must be feeling a little cheap and sleazy. Don’t try to hide it, denial only makes things worse.

This is not to slam you. I do not make light of your legitimate concerns. But if because you are lonely you take up with a gold-digging, abusing, cheating, shrew of a woman, I would feel compelled to tell you you are being taken advantage of. Though it may seem to you cruel for me to point out the truth, it must be done or she will lead you into greater misfortunes than befell you before you met her. And Trump is not what you want him to be, need him to be. He is a self-serving egomaniac who needs constant attention. Look through my eyes for one moment and tell me if you cannot see it. I say this not to mock you but as a friend who wants what’s best for you.

Sane societies do not elect psychological case studies such as Donald Trump president. Healthy nations never permit a howler monkey near a microphone, let alone the nation’s nuclear codes. The response to Trump so far, by those who see his flaws, has been an emotional but ultimately impotent attack on the man himself. But if we wish to insure we never again let such an incompetent guide our nation, we have to re-evaluate every single aspect of our culture if we are to come to grips with what is wrong with us. We must question what kind of media we have, one that made him a star before enabling his rise to the presidency. We need to question the churches we go to that somehow see this man as compatible with Christianity. We need to question our nation’s morals and norms if we want to understand why we accepted someone who utterly lacks such standards.

We must ask ourselves many, many questions, and we must do so dispassionately. We must do so without attempting to find easy answers. We must do so without pointing the finger, but rather through personal reflection, asking ourselves how we helped create a society that has sunk so low, so lacking in morality, decency, respect for one another, and even simple good taste.

We must question the music and entertainment industries, must question the examples we set for our children and our neighbors’ children. We must question how we treat those we work for and those who work for us. We must question our relationship to our government. We must ask ourselves what kind of world we want for our children and then ask how we can best meet those aspirations while leaving room for the desires of those who want something different for their descendants.

We must ask ourselves all these questions and more, and we must do so HUMBLY the way an alcoholic must question his life after getting into a car accident while under the influence. Because we have screwed up, we have screwed up very badly. This is a moment for reflection, America. Do not abandon reason for emotion.