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.