“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth
and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers,
and for time, they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fail.
Think of it, always.
- Mahatma Gandhi
I had not encountered this quote until after Trump became part of our American politics. It gives me hope, namely, because it is historically so true.
How Donald Trump got to where he has been, and continues to be presently, will fill volumes of virtual pages in future history books.
Hopefully, and due to much hard, persistent, continuing and dedicated work by the American people, a few years from now we will be talking about how it ended for Trump. We will talk about the era of illusion; the constant and unceasing smoke-and-mirrors shows, the classic con jobs, the barrage of lies during his “presidency” that never ended, not even for one moment, starting from that ill-fated inauguration day in 2017 when he insisted that his crowd size was the largest ever. “Larger than Obama’s” he kept saying. We will talk about how it always seemed the whole thing was about his need to be larger than Obama. And how that never, ever stopped.
We will talk about how the Republican party died of attrition; not one of them willing to stand up to Trump, to join together and declare “The emperor has no clothes!” We will recall that very few who did decide to do so were “fired,” and not allowed back in.
We will relive the days that the actual truth was entirely cast out, and those who decided to “tell-it-like-it-is” were constantly shamed, ostracized and threatened for doing so. We will tell the story of a normal and traditional day of certifying the 2020 election for Joe Biden that started under a dark and ominous cloud, Trump getting his base getting all hyped with his Big Lie, erupting into something straight out of hell itself. We will talk about how they hung a gallows to hang the Vice President for not committing a heinous crime against the American people for his boss, who responded by encouraging the mob to publicly execute him.
Years from now we may find ourselves discussing amongst our friends and family members how Putin and his cohorts at the Kremlin invited members of Congress to the Kremlin during the 2018 July 4th holiday, and how no one really found out what exactly was discussed. But that one thing was for sure, any loyalty they had to the United States seemed erased from their brains after that.
We will remember Trump as a thug, a projector-in-chief, a psychologically damaged child who somehow rose to power in his life through a string of lucky breaks and a personalized education of crime taught to him by his monster father Fred Trump and notoriously crime-ridden lawyer Roy Cohn.
We will recall Trump’s brazenness, his bloviating, his physically pushing other diplomats aside at an international gathering so he could puff his chest out like a male peacock on the stage, and putting his bluster embarrassingly on full display in front of the world.
We will discuss how gross he was.
We will talk about how we cringed when he spoke, how sick we felt when we kept hearing his name over and over without ceasing, every moment of every day for the better part of an entire decade, like we were all being subjected to some kind of Chinese water torture. And we will reflect upon what exactly happened to the psyche of half of the American people who continued to believe that Trump was good for this country. Perhaps by that time in the future we will have all of it figured out.
We will have done the research and found out with specificity how the minds of so many American people were able to tune out human decency only to replace it with vitriolic divisiveness. We will figure out how they were moved to cast a vote for a demonstrated sociopathic malignant narcissist who could only cause harm to them. We will marvel at how Trump obviously botched a pandemic response so badly, but his loyal fans still stuck by him as their friends and family members died from Covid.
We will talk more about how to prevent “cult minds” from developing before they take hold of entire societies.
In the future we will perhaps be reflecting on how mainstream media finally ended up kicked-to-the-curb when the viewers who counted on them for the news only got “non-news,” and eventually got pissed off enough to abandon them. We will be talking about the demise of FOX, who continued to defend the indefensible, got sued up the wazoo, and people finally awakened from their mass hypnosis, bored with the lies and the screeching and the hatred.
And all the insanity ended.
“…for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail. Think of it always. “
We’ve got this. We can work hard and fix it. This is our time.
Right now it is WE who are making history.