Annie, I agree with you (and Will) that we need to "move on (and back) to the kind of conversation that helps illuminate what our future can be as a nation and as a society."
I think this kind of conversation -- despite all the distracting noise generated by all things Trump -- is happening all the time, even here at HCR's Letter. But we …
Annie, I agree with you (and Will) that we need to "move on (and back) to the kind of conversation that helps illuminate what our future can be as a nation and as a society."
I think this kind of conversation -- despite all the distracting noise generated by all things Trump -- is happening all the time, even here at HCR's Letter. But we have an immediate problem that needs to be dealt with decisively before any truly constructive conversations can bear fruit in terms of electoral results, improvements to the social state, inclusion of historically excluded minorities, fairer wealth distribution, etc., to say nothing of "dealing with" climate change, reversing the destruction of fauna and natural habitats, and eliminating nuclear weapons (still our most immediate existential threat as it has been since the first A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima).
The problem -- as embodied by Trump -- is that a sizable chunk of the US population really believes the greatest impediment to America becoming "great again" is that there are too many of "those" people doing and believing in terrible things that threaten the lives and mores of "real" Americans, and that much of this is being planned and carried out by a "deep state" that will try to "replace" them -- the real Americans -- with racial, ethnic and religious minorities who will then "take over" everything.... and of course the rest is just too terrible to even imagine, so I won't even try.
If close to half the voting population is living a terrifying and totally false fantasy that the rest of us struggle to take seriously in factual terms, and this is bringing us all to the edge of an abyss of societal breakdown, then clearly this is the most urgent and immediate problem to be dealt with. Simply putting Donald Trump on a desert isle (literally or figuratively) somewhere will not make this terror ("theirs" as well as "ours") go away, but a government that deals with a lying, serially criminal former President in the same way it deals with other lying serial criminals (garden variety?) will reestablish its own credibility and increase its popularity just enough to take effective control of both houses of Congress in 2024 and then deal seriously with all the other problems our current political configuration just cannot handle.
When a rabid dog has his teeth in the seat of your trousers and is trying to rip them to shreds before going for the meat, it is useless to wonder how you are ever going to sew up those trousers you like so much.
Trump is a rabid dog who needs to be suppressed. If he ever achieves some measure of self-knowledge, staring at his toes all day in a very bland room day after day, he will thank us. Let's help him and us and just call it tough love.
David, I can tell you feel strongly about this. But the only thing I can think of in reply is this: you're not saying anything that hasn't been gone over and over and over repeatedly for months. Years. As a young thoughtful and appropriately nervy young woman said not too long ago: "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I'm with her. I'm hoping for dialogue about how we get there, not words that are almost scripted by now.
Okay, Annie, fine. There is a lot of blah, blah here, not only mine. And clearly nothing is going to solve our and the world's problems unless we can express a government able and willing to make big changes in the way we do things, and I expect we are in substantial agreement as to what those things are.
So, either enough people vote the right way in the next general elections to set us on a whole new path to societal survival or we slide into authoritarianism following some sort of disaster involving large crowds of angry people doing violent things to one another as they express their deeply held convictions with the hundreds of millions of AR-15s that even 15 year olds can easily acquire.
And the climate scientists tell us time is running out.
I think legally removing Trump from the equation asap is step number one. What would you do first, given that blah, blah seems to do nothing in the absence of acts?
Annie, I agree with you (and Will) that we need to "move on (and back) to the kind of conversation that helps illuminate what our future can be as a nation and as a society."
I think this kind of conversation -- despite all the distracting noise generated by all things Trump -- is happening all the time, even here at HCR's Letter. But we have an immediate problem that needs to be dealt with decisively before any truly constructive conversations can bear fruit in terms of electoral results, improvements to the social state, inclusion of historically excluded minorities, fairer wealth distribution, etc., to say nothing of "dealing with" climate change, reversing the destruction of fauna and natural habitats, and eliminating nuclear weapons (still our most immediate existential threat as it has been since the first A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima).
The problem -- as embodied by Trump -- is that a sizable chunk of the US population really believes the greatest impediment to America becoming "great again" is that there are too many of "those" people doing and believing in terrible things that threaten the lives and mores of "real" Americans, and that much of this is being planned and carried out by a "deep state" that will try to "replace" them -- the real Americans -- with racial, ethnic and religious minorities who will then "take over" everything.... and of course the rest is just too terrible to even imagine, so I won't even try.
If close to half the voting population is living a terrifying and totally false fantasy that the rest of us struggle to take seriously in factual terms, and this is bringing us all to the edge of an abyss of societal breakdown, then clearly this is the most urgent and immediate problem to be dealt with. Simply putting Donald Trump on a desert isle (literally or figuratively) somewhere will not make this terror ("theirs" as well as "ours") go away, but a government that deals with a lying, serially criminal former President in the same way it deals with other lying serial criminals (garden variety?) will reestablish its own credibility and increase its popularity just enough to take effective control of both houses of Congress in 2024 and then deal seriously with all the other problems our current political configuration just cannot handle.
When a rabid dog has his teeth in the seat of your trousers and is trying to rip them to shreds before going for the meat, it is useless to wonder how you are ever going to sew up those trousers you like so much.
Trump is a rabid dog who needs to be suppressed. If he ever achieves some measure of self-knowledge, staring at his toes all day in a very bland room day after day, he will thank us. Let's help him and us and just call it tough love.
David, I can tell you feel strongly about this. But the only thing I can think of in reply is this: you're not saying anything that hasn't been gone over and over and over repeatedly for months. Years. As a young thoughtful and appropriately nervy young woman said not too long ago: "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I'm with her. I'm hoping for dialogue about how we get there, not words that are almost scripted by now.
Okay, Annie, fine. There is a lot of blah, blah here, not only mine. And clearly nothing is going to solve our and the world's problems unless we can express a government able and willing to make big changes in the way we do things, and I expect we are in substantial agreement as to what those things are.
So, either enough people vote the right way in the next general elections to set us on a whole new path to societal survival or we slide into authoritarianism following some sort of disaster involving large crowds of angry people doing violent things to one another as they express their deeply held convictions with the hundreds of millions of AR-15s that even 15 year olds can easily acquire.
And the climate scientists tell us time is running out.
I think legally removing Trump from the equation asap is step number one. What would you do first, given that blah, blah seems to do nothing in the absence of acts?