Is Trump A New Low or Has It Always Been Like This?

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.