On Thursday morning, I awoke to the anniversary of the day I was born. It was not one of the much-discussed “zero birthdays,” but one nonetheless that gives one pause to reflect on one’s mortality and where approximately one is in the overall game. As I thought about that sobering number (I still can’t say it), I realized I’m in the fourth quarter. I’m heartened by the fact that some of the most outstanding touchdowns have been made in the final quarter, often with minutes or seconds left on the clock; so sitting out this quarter on the bench (or rocking chair) is not an option, and I’m excited about what treasures remain to be discovered.
On Saturday morning, I stood at attention in the bleachers–where I was about to watch my two grandsons’ baseball team win a decisive 13-5 victory–listening to a recorded voice belt out the words to our national anthem. The national anthem has always brought a lump to my throat. With all of our country’s problems and moral failings, I’ve been grateful for the privilege of being born here and enjoying the benefits of citizenship in a country which so many have risked their lives trying to reach and be granted the citizenship which I and my fellow Americans may often have taken for granted.
On that particular Saturday morning, however, the lump in my throat and the tears that stung my eyes were inspired not by my pride in the USA–though I am still proud of my country–but by the awful reality of things that are happening which I could never have dreamed possible in my earlier life. I have lived under 13 presidents, not including the impostor who currently lives in the White House. I have lived through four wars, the Cold War, the Jim Crow era, the battles for social change in the 1960s, the assassination of a president and the murders of a presidential candidate and a beloved civil rights leader, the riots of 1968, the Watergate scandal, the impeachment of a president and near-impeachment of another, more recently the mass murders of hundreds of innocent people by crazed gunmen, and plenty more. I’ve witnessed the signs marking whites-only territories, separating them from the spaces relegated to people of color, and I’ve seen those signs enforced. I know that I live in a country stolen from its native inhabitants.
I’m under no illusions, nor have I ever been under any illusion, that the country of which I’m proud to be a citizen is a model of moral rectitude. What has given me hope, however, is the values to which such a plurality of my fellow citizens ascribed that they became known as our defining American values. However dark the day, I believed that there were more good people than bad, that my government would eventually correct its course and move in the direction of greater justice and equality for all, that a champion or hero would always appear on the scene who could grab the confidence of enough people to start a movement which would make things better. Our president has for years been granted the title “leader of the free world,” because so many other countries look to the USA for leadership and support.
The first presidential election I can remember is the contest between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. I recall chanting on the school playground, “We like Ike! He’s our man! We threw Stevenson in the garbage can!” From that time on, I’ve liked some presidents and disliked others, agreed with some and disagreed with others, wished some could have remained in office longer, and counted the days until others would finally leave. I watched through tears, holding my 8-month-old firstborn baby on my lap, as Richard Nixon made his resignation speech. No president had ever resigned during his elected term, and I wondered what kind of country we were leaving our children when such a thing could happen.
With such deep scars on our history, what is it that makes today different from any other time? Why do I suddenly feel I won’t live long enough to see my country restored to its previous level of respect and leadership in the world? What is so much worse now than the way things have always been?
Those questions can be only partially answered at this time; historians will wrestle for years to come to put the events of this so-far young century into perspective and to trace the long-term effects of today’s morass of corruption and scandal. For starters, though, the presidents I can remember–the best of them and the worst of them–have been men of knowledge and principle. They have been bred to conduct themselves with a level of decorum that befits the leader of a great country and of the free world. With notable exceptions, they have acted in what they at least believed was the best interest of our country. More importantly, when leaders have failed, citizens have taken it upon themselves to speak out and take action against injustice and corruption–sometimes in mass demonstrations. Things have always seemed to get better; the good guys usually win. Until now.
The tears that welled up in my eyes during last Saturday’s playing of the national anthem were caused by the bitter reality that none of those things are currently true. We have an impostor living in the people’s house who is okay with ripping apart families, putting babies in cages, and then sexually assaulting those babies. He’s okay with the fact that the thousands of children are living in these obscene conditions may never be reunited with their families because no one thought it important to keep track of which child goes with which family and where all of the families are. He refuses to speak out against white supremacists who commit acts of horror, calling them instead “very fine people.” He threatens and encourages violence against his political opponents, most recently speaking these chilling words to a Breitbart News interviewer: “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of Bikers for Trump — I have tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point and then it would be very, very bad.” Bikers for Trump? Really?
Never before have we had a thug or a mob boss in the White House who is profiting off the presidency. Never before have we had a president who lies every day and whose lies are obvious and easily disprovable. Never before have we had a president who daily attacks private citizens, members of his government, and other national leaders. Never before have we had a president who prefers receiving his information from Fox News instead of classified intelligence briefings. Never before have we had a president too illiterate and intellectually incurious to read daily briefings. Never before have we had a president under FBI investigation since the first day of his presidency. Never before have we had a president who it is credibly reported got elected with help from a foreign adversary.
President Obama is known as the first social media president, since those platforms were just coming into common use during his terms in office; but not until Donald Trump have we had a president who uses Twitter as a weapon to attack his opponents, send dog whistles to his “base,” and incite insurrection. Not until Donald Trump have we had a president with the temperament and vocabulary of a toddler, who expresses his disdain for opponents by calling them childish names. And not until Donald Trump have we had a president who surrounds himself with the most vulgar and criminal element of society. Never before Donald Trump have we had a president cited by a mass murderer as his hero and inspiration.
Yet as sobering and appalling as all of this is, these are not our country’s worst problems. Even worse than having a thoroughly corrupt “president” is the fact that this morally degraded con man has an enthusiastic following that just can’t wait to vote for him again! Trump’s approval ratings have pretty consistently remained somewhere in the 40-something-percent range. While those of us who stay awake at night wondering when and how this long national nightmare may end take comfort in the fact that he has less than a majority, it’s not much less. And given the number of people who don’t give a crap and the number who support third-party candidates and the nonsense of the electoral college, 40-something is enough to win an election. It already did. Those of us who might like to console ourselves with the thought that even if Mueller doesn’t come through, Congress doesn’t impeach, and the Southern District of New York’s actions don’t come to fruition before 2020, our fellow citizens are intelligent enough and morally upright enough to soundly vote him out of office are fooling ourselves.
We’re also fooling ourselves when we lamely recite such mantras as “This is not who we are” and “We’re better than this.” The ugly truth is that when forty percent or more of a country’s citizens look at a corrupt government and applaud it and enthusiastically await their opportunity to extend that government another four years, this IS who we are. We’re not better than this; we really are this bad.
Every day I ask myself the question, “How on earth can that many people see the same things I’m seeing and think they’re okay or good or a dream come true?” How on earth can the people who live in the same country I live in praise the same things I abhor? How can they be okay with a president who attacks dead national heroes and praises dictators and white supremacists? How can they excuse the ignoring of presidential duties such as speaking on behalf of our country to express sincere condolence when another country is reeling from the murder of 49 citizens?
The short answer to all of those questions is that Trump’s supporters share his degraded values; morally, he is one of them. The racism that’s written into our national DNA, that so many gave their last ounce of energy and devotion to overcome, never really went away; it just went underground. This 40-something percent of our fellow citizens seethed the whole time at the restraint of “political correctness” which prevented them from uttering racial epithets and denying citizens of color the rights they deserve. Then along came a candidate who spoke their frustration out loud: Damn political correctness! Every vile, vulgar word that comes out of their leader’s mouth perfectly articulates their own prejudices and frustrations and their fear of losing the only power most of them have: the superior position given them by the accidents of birth, white skin and male gender. They’re terrified of losing their majority, and this leader promises to help them retain it. What’s not to love?
We’ll never have a better president until we become better people. Donald Trump is the people’s choice (and Vladimir Putin’s); and for all of his ignorance, rage, tweet storms, threats, attacks, childish tantrums, and moral corruption, close to half of the people in this country support him. They support him because they are him. There’s no other reason. We’re not better than this; we are this. The tragedy of America is not Donald Trump, it’s the fact that people love Donald Trump, approve of his vileness, and want to extend the nightmare an extra four years. Now what do we do about that?
Trump is who he is; that won’t change. He doesn’t want to change, and nothing any of us can do will change him. The only thing we can change is ourselves. How do we correct the failure of our schools that have neglected to teach students critical thinking skills and left them vulnerable to the rantings of a madman? How do we address the corruption in our churches that have so perverted their theology as to make a Donald Trump not only acceptable but a gift straight from God: a tool of the Almighty to wield justice and usher in the long-sought theocracy? How do we finally once-and-for-all get to the roots of our racism and all of the other isms and cleanse ourselves from these darkest parts of our human nature?
Healing must begin by heeding the appeal of President Lincoln:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
John Winthrop, one of the leaders in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its governor for 12 of the first 20 years of its existence, said in 1630:
“For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world . . .”
Now almost 400 years later, the eyes of the whole world are still upon us; and what they’re seeing is pretty embarrassing some days. Winthrop’s lofty metaphor of a city upon a hill comes with a stern and sobering warning: “We could become a story and a byword through the world.” In other words, don’t take this privilege and position for granted; if you do, you can squander the opportunity to demonstrate that the government our founders envision is capable of succeeding. Those founders saw our nation as a great experiment which was supposed to determine whether humans could live as equals and be trusted to govern themselves, to prove that we didn’t need a monarch. Governor Winthrop warned, however, that if we failed to live out the best parts of our human nature, our name could become synonymous with the failure of a great human experiment and proof that evil will triumph over good in the end.
Evil hasn’t triumphed yet, but it’s gained way too strong a foothold for my comfort. Forget Donald Trump! He won’t be around forever (it will only seem that way), but our children and grandchildren will live in the world we’re creating right now. I don’t expect to see the full undoing of this corrupt period in my lifetime, but I want my grandchildren and your grandchildren to live in a country governed by men and women in touch with their better angels. What can you and I do right now to help create that kind of world for our grandchildren and their grandchildren? The eyes of the whole world are watching us.