The Fatalism of Donald Trump

There are things we cannot admit to ourselves.

Americans elected Donald Trump. He was neither deceptive nor cunning.  His vanity and self-centered will was on full display.  His unofficial campaign slogan could have been, “What you see is what you get.”  He surprised no one.  We surprised ourselves.

We have it well-off in America when compared to all but a few smaller and more homogeneous countries.  Our rich are richer and our poor are better off than many other places on Earth.  Our standard of living, economically speaking, is still the envy of billions.  Yet, we see ourselves as broken, and we blame each other at the same time we look to those we blame for solutions.  Some of us are proof that having is never as powerful as wanting, and others are proof that we must be careful what we wish for.

Of course, none of this makes any sense to us.  That is the dilemma of our fate.  Many outside our fishbowl see a paradox or a parable - a great nation that may have grown too self-absorbed and arrogant, but it is much more insidious than that.

America is an oversized example of life itself - a crucible of competing survivors where the definition of ‘the fittest’ most quickly evolves.  Countries like India and China are seen as more rapidly emerging but actually are just trying to catch up by using a model we created decades ago and are now abandoning.  We reached the point where too many were satisfied with the status quo.  At that point, the rich and powerful realized they were losing leverage over the working class, and the poor realized they were not as desperate as the poorer, who were pouring into our country from other desperate places.  Both rich and poor blamed the government, which is an indirect way of blaming ourselves, and that is the greatest truth.

Those in the middle, who still find comfort in the system that gave them comfort, resist the revelation of a broken government and bewilder at the enormity of the problem.  We cannot go back, and yet the future is a fog.  Forward thinking becomes useless when facing the unthinkable.

The Donald embodies the worst, not of each of us but of our dilemma.  His self-centered instincts are the embodiment of what America is becoming.  We cannot see the path but choose to trample each other rather than work together to create a new way.

In simpler times, there would be war or anarchy or, most likely, both.  ‘Simpler’ means no nuclear weapons, as war and anarchy are still quite common around the world.  If America has anarchy, the world may end not metaphorically but literally.  We know that but take too much comfort in thinking we could never become so mad.  Things happen when everyone is certain they cannot.

Bottom line, there is no answer to our dilemma.  Answers are thought out, and we cannot think our way out of this.  At the same time, we cannot face that very fact.

If your thought about this is, “We must be doomed!” then your are thinking too much.  If you dismiss this as mere fatalism, then your lack of forethought is very much in line with our Nation’s.