My friend thinks
Trump is a new low, what with caging and separating children, the
constant lying, the fear-mongering, and all that. Pinker and Gates
and people like that think life is getting better. But I myself think
that it’s always been this way.
I grew up in the USA
during 1950’s and remember what high school and Pennsy Prep were
like. I remember my university and graduate schools being essentially
poison.
I saw what the USA
did to me for opposing the Viet-Nam and Iraq invasions and crimes,
and I remember the assassinations.
The “Howl”
resonates from long before Lear to the Now of organized crime, the
medical industry, consciously enshrined selfishness, the “elites.”
Two twelve-year-old girls on my street alone got pregnant this year and that very bright ten-year-old girl from the next street who visits me once in a while loves books but has never been to a library in her life.
Sarah Silverman
came the closest in her Thanksgiving Monologue that I can
come to seeing a positive development – the fact that Trump is so
absurd that more people than ever can see The Great America
for what it actually is. And then there is Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders
and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and all the uncounted millions who
support them and wish them well and thank them.
I look at this now,
as an old man close to death, and feel that Trump is not a new
low, but that it has always been like this. Perhaps that is in accord
with what I think is the answer to the theodicy question: Namely,
evil exists so that we can know, appreciate, the difference.
