When my wife worked as an ICU nurse, she once had a patient who had a really bad toothache. He took some Tylenol, but it didn’t help much, so he took some more Tylenol. Since he was an alcoholic, he washed it all down with beer. After a few days of this, he started experiencing abdominal pain, which resulted in my wife caring for him in the ICU.
It turns out that his liver was dying and could not be saved. He wasn’t eligible for a transplant and none were available (these take a lot of time to find a match). Essentially, he was already dead but he didn’t know it. He lived for a few more days, and then he was gone.
At times I think that is where we are in the US. It is not that the country will stop existing or that we will be invaded by another country – it’s that life as we knew it has forever changed and most of us have not realized it yet. We are losing our place in the world. Many of the advantages that we took for granted will be gone. We have crossed the Rubicon, although it will take some time for the consequences to take effect.
To be clear – I’m not talking about the stock market. It will go up and down either way. I’m talking more about our way of life.
I will talk a lot about Trump, although I must admit that Trump is more of a symptom and the people are the problem. He is who he is and we all knew what he was before we voted in the last election – nobody should be surprised by anything that is happening now. But I think that people will be surprised by what it all means long-term.
It’s common for a president to make mistakes or to do things people don’t agree with. People thought that the world was ending under Bush Jr., but we bounced back OK. But when long held precedents are shattered, new precedents become the norm. Sometimes we cross lines that cannot be uncrossed. Some things will change relatively quickly, while other things will happen more slowly. But things have been set in motion that at best will take a generation to be undone.
When FDR ran for a third and a fourth term, congress had a choice. Two term maximums had been the long-held precedent, but it was never canonized in the constitution. Either they would change the constitution, or get used to presidents serving for much longer periods of time. They chose to amend the constitution. I don’t think that there’s a chance that will happen this time.
Trump clearly wants to be a king – to rule with impunity. I don’t think that he will succeed (or at best will have limited success). I’m also guessing that much of the MAGA cult will die when he does (which will probably happen sooner rather than later). But the attitudes and intellectual rigor that allowed the MAGA cult to grow will not die, and at some point Trump will have walked so that somebody else can run.
Anyway, this is where I get to write about how screwed we are. I’m not sure why I’m writing all of this – it is depressing, nobody will believe it, nobody will even read this, and much of it is already too late to change. Maybe this is just a space for me to figure things out.
But I’m just the messenger – you can blame me, but the real blame is on everybody who voted for this.
