Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."
It has become popular, to a degree I've never seen before with any president, to hate Donald Trump. Even the mainstream media now deride him, often daily, in the most explicit terms; and I agree wholeheartedly that his presidency is a disaster, but we've had disastrous presidencies before that were widely applauded.
When Lyndon Johnson took us deeper, and deeper, into the horror of Vietnam, his presidency was still respected by the media - and the majority of Americans were behind him. When the Bush Jr. administration covered up evidence that he had evaded the draft during the Vietnam War, and then deserted a plush, state-side, National Guard post, it was Dan Rather at CBS News who was pilloried and forced to resign for having the temerity to report it. Bush himself never was held to account, the way any other American citizen would have been. When that same administration lied to take us to war, and reversed a public policy of never resorting to torture in the conduct of war, Americans by and large went along. So what is really different about Trump?
To address this question we must see, among many things, a significant aspect of American society that we rarely talk about. That is, that the great majority of us are descended from the desperately poor of other nations, who sought asylum here. This fact has shaped America in many ways, but the foremost is that it has produced a nation of avid materialists. That would seem an almost inescapable result. When millions descend on a continent with nothing but the clothes on their backs, their wants and desires are tremendous. Yet they bring more than just material deprivation, they also bring spiritual and psychological deprivation; a desperation that cannot be satisfied by a chicken in every pot or two cars in every garage. Fear, insecurity and anxiety have a way of becoming chronic, something with life of its own, independent of any rational concerns.
In some strange way having to do with the makeup of our nature, and of the universe, whatever we most fear has a way of manifesting itself in our lives until we find a constructive way of dealing with it. We see this in people with paranoia, when suspicion of other people often produces the very hostility and ostracism that the paranoid individual most fears, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction. Often the very thing we fear enough to run from becomes the thing we can never escape. And so we Americans, more than normally afraid of privation, at least in the first world, have come to produce a society with an unnecessary level of material and psucological privation.
The North American continent has been more than rich enough to provide for all its people. Yet our fear of poverty produces a way of looking at the world that in turn produces the social conditions in which unnecessary poverty exists. We tend to simply grab whatever we can get, without thinking of the effects of such behavior on society as a whole. Fear of scarcity produces a culture of exaggerated and vicious competition that poisons life, often even at the level of families, and we are all adversely affected by such low grade internecine warfare.
Competition within families shows how fear of deprivation produces a deprivation of spirit that is more destructive than poverty itself. Thus we come to see one another, not as human beings, but as competitors for sustenance, and for the parsimonious levels of love and approval that are only made parsimonious through our perception of a scarcity existing mostly in our minds. These things, love and acceptance, though they should exist in unlimited abundance, become things in incredibly limited supply in such a culture, and this deprivation of love and acceptance in turn produces psychological aberration that contributes to such things as mass shootings.
It must also be said that many of us in America truly believe in this approach to life, and that goes for those on the left, as well as the right. Those who live according to the expectation of reciprocated love in families, and of social responsibility in their communities, on the other hand, are quite often shunned in America. The message is everywhere the same. "We don't care!"
When Melania Trump went to an internment camp, purportedly to console immigrant children separated from their parents, wearing a jacket saying "I don't care, do you?" she spoke for a great number, if not the majority, of Americans. No, we don't care. That's the message we give to one another, and to anyone else who's willing, or forced, to listen. We don’t care how others are treated. The mean-spirited policies America has followed, through both Republican and Democratic administrations since at least 1980, have shown that message to be the modern philosophy of the nation. We Don’t care! No, what the majority in America care about, is money. Money is seen as the universal cure for want, both material and spiritual, and how a person managed to get that money is irrelevant. Whether they are Saint Francis, or Jack The Ripper, it simply doesn’t matter.
So at last we must ask ourselves, why do people hate Donald Trump? Surely Trump himself must ask this question all the time, and one can understand his perplexity. All his life he’s been treated as a demigod because he has had money. In America, to have money is everything. If you have it, you can evade military service, be a deserter, go to war on other nations, for contrived reasons, and face no consequences whatever. You can be a serial rapist. You can steal billions of dollars. You can commit murder and get away with it. All of these propositions, and more have been shown to be true, and few are any longer even ashamed of it.
A visitor to ancient Rome, once said, acidly. . . "In Rome everything is for sale!" In America we brag about it! It shames us not. We are shameless.
So what if Donald Trump inherited money from a grandfather who ran a whore house in the Canadian gold rush? Who cares if he pays to have sex with prostitutes? Who cares if his wife was a prostitute? Who cares if foreign dictators have the results on film? Who cares if he loved foreign dictators? So what if he treats his employees like sub-humans, or cheats college students out of a legitimate education? Others have done these and far worse, and been admired - nay, practically deified in America.
Yes, Donald must wonder why people are suddenly so down on him. He exemplifies everything we believe and value in the early 21st century! He’s rich! He doesn’t care how he makes money - a whore house is as good as a license to practice medicine, and why shouldn't it be? If Trump uses his money to exploit people, to sexually abuse them, to bully and intimidate those around him, why shouldn’t he? That’s the American dream! We have said so! We have striven, and strive, for a world in which anybody can rise to the top of any kind of pile and call it success!
It isn’t what Trump believes that enrages us. It’s that he isn't poised and well-mannered enough to afford those beliefs an acceptable cover, the way Barack Obama did. That is because, in essence, they both represent the same world view - one based on a contrived, and self-perpetuating, fear of scarcity. In a democracy those leaders who rise to the fore inevitably represent our real values, whether we like to admit it or not. If they didn't, they couldn't find themselves in contention for high office in the first place. So the only question is whether we are willing to confront, and reject those blighted values, or whether we merely blame Donald Trump, and through the delusion that he himself is the problem, prevent anything from changing? Unless we heal the wounds derived of poverty and abuse as discarded immigrants, and replace them with a new flowering of life in ourselves and others, then getting rid of Donald Trump can have no meaningful effect. We will merely remain trapped in fear, hatred, and misery. For the problem isn't Donald Trump himself, but that there's a Donald Trump somewhere hidden inside us all.
Brent Hightower
Copyright 2018, Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogsot.com
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