Our country has been through very difficult times in our history. I lived through some of them in the 60s when I was a college student.
The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the fight for racial justice, including the KKK killings of civil rights workers, mass protests against the Viet Nam War, college students being shot and killed by the National Guard at Kent State University, there were times when it seemed the country was coming apart at the seams.
I vividly remember coming close to losing all hope for the future when Dr. King was assassinated. The Kennedy deaths were horrible enough, but when he was killed, it seemed the country had fallen into a moral and political abyss.
Sadly, as bad as those days were, I believe what we are experiencing right now is worse, all because for some inexplicable reason enough Americans voted to elect the worst person on the planet to be president.
And as predictable as the sun coming up, he has become enemy #1 to the survival of our country as we have known it.
Trump is not simply an autocrat, he is a totalitarian, that is, someone who wants “to control every part of public and private life, leaving no room for personal freedom, free speech, or a separate political opposition.”
Proof of his intentions can be found in numerous examples, none more obvious than his use of Executive Orders (EO).
Since he took office again, Trump has issued a record 274 EO. Each of them begins with the words, “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.”
Thus, as a would-be totalitarian, he is inserting himself into every aspect of our lives, including determining the vaccines doctors should give and not give to our children.
Of course, as usual, none of this should surprise us. After all, Trump himself said, “I can do whatever I want as President.”
Only he can’t. Executive Orders are official directives issued by the president regarding the management of executive branch agencies. While they carry the force of law, they cannot create new laws or override existing laws, nor can they regulate citizen’s rights or tell state governments what they can and cannot do.
In short, executive orders must be consistent with laws passed by the Congress, unless, of course, a president chooses to ignore those laws, as Trump does constantly.
As a result of his open disregard for the rule of law, nearly 160 of the 274 Executive Orders he has issued have either been blocked, halted, delayed, or partially enjoined in court.
But implementation of executive orders, Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs points out, is not Trump’s primary goal. Instead, he wants them to reinforce the image he has of himself as a king whose authority is not to be challenged.
That’s a first for us as Americans, and it is both frustrating and exhausting.
Sometimes I feel like running outside and screaming to the top of my voice the words of Howard Beale in the film Network, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”
But what calms me down is calling to mind the first line of the Rudyard Kipling poem “If” that says: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.”
We see people all around us losing their heads. They’re called Republicans.
But the key to the future is keeping ours, difficult as that is. That is why I write this blog every week, in the hope that once in a while I write something that not only that speaks to you, but speaks for you.
The news media, of course, often makes it sound like Trump has managed to cause most Americans to lose their heads.
Joy and I see evidence of it almost daily when we drive by the home of a retired military guy down the street from us who still has a QAnon sign in his front yard.
But the truth is, the media is wrong, and this man represents a small group of people who have the freedom to lose their heads while most of us are keeping ours.
A recent YouGov poll, for example, found that 79% of all Americans believe vaccines are very or somewhat safe, 13% believe they are not very safe and only 8% believe they’re not safe at all.
Most of the latter two categories were Republicans and independents, and only 4% Democrats.
That 21% of adult Americans don’t trust vaccines given the history of medical triumphs over childhood diseases and the millions of lives saved because of the Covid vaccine is astonishing.
But when viewed in the context of a predictable percentage of people always losing their head no matter what the issue is tells me that it isn’t very surprising or alarming at all.
Kipling ends his poem by suggesting that maturity shows itself when we can “watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.”
It is not easy to watch Trump break things generations of Americans have given their lives to preserve and protect, but we will fix all of it with the same worn-out tools of sacrifice, unity, and determination Americans have always used.
We must simply keep our heads until that time comes.
linnposts.com 