How Can I Miss Him

I really need to get out more in terms of my media diet. Aside from Highlights and Grit, everything I read or watch has stories on a regular basis about the inevitability of Donald J. Trump campaigning for the Republican Party nomination for President in 2024 and returning to the White House. 

I grew up with Republicans like Charles Percy and Edward Brooke, from Illinois and Massachusetts, respectively. For many years, in my home state, New Jersey, Clifford Case was a Senator, Millicent Fenwick, put that in your pipe and smoke it, and Peter Freylingheusen were in Congress and all of them were Republicans. 

Quite frankly, maybe it was just in Jersey, but for the most part, it was pretty hard to distinguish R's from D's in terms of policies and practices across most of the political spectrum. I'm not sure when that all changed but I'm damn sure it hasn't changed for the better and I've been watching it pretty closely since returning to the Land of the Round Doorknobs in the fall of 1991. 

Both sides of the aisle haven't exactly covered themselves in glory in recent decades but the nadir, at least so far, in my lifetime, has been the candidacy and subsequent election of Trump. And having lived through four years of his operating-a-roller-coaster-while-on-speed approach to any and all matters of state, I have zero desire to welcome back him in anything other than an orange jumpsuit doing a perp walk on the evening news. 

Trump's Presidency created a universe of alternative facts, fake media that was an enemy of the people, and turned truth into an NFT.

His words and behaviors both excused and emboldened the most abhorrent of boorish behavior on ALL sides of the political spectrum. Trump did not create the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the "Jews Will Not Replace Us" crowd, or even the QAnon Whack Jobs, but he allowed them visibility, viability, and validation they had never before experienced. 

And such extremism at one end of the spectrum was, by Newton's Laws, bound to provoke equal extremism at the other end of the spectrum, leaving little room for compromise and even less for agreement.

Every single one of us became worse human beings, not just bad Americans, because of the increasing coarseness and disappearing civility of our civil discourse with one another. Combined with the ideological online biospheres created through all manner of social and electronic media far too many of us have engaged, and continue to so do, in 'Us vs. Them.'

Rational thought has been replaced by harsh invective whose goal is no longer to engage and persuade but to demonize and denigrate those with whom we disagree. Trump is our mirror image and too many of us like what we see.
-bill kenny