Through a Child’s Eyes

“There’s a particular person that I feel like is the root of all darkness and evilness that’s going on the world right now,” says actor Storm Reid.

Reid is 14 years old and she co-stars in next year’s movie “A Wrinkle in Time” with Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling.

Fourteen years old, and she can see it, while millions of so-called grownups, vision veiled with the cataracts of hatred and indifference that the putrescent presidency of Donald Trump has cast like a malignant spell over too much of America, go about their puttering daily lives with no sense of the impending catastrophe that awaits their own children should this blathering, chilling psychopath continue unchecked.

What must it have taken for 14-year-old girl – actor or no – to arrive at this evident conclusion? What must the darkness and yes, evil, spewing from the very seat of our democracy sounded like to her to prompt her to make this dismal observation?

The very idea that a 14-year-old girl could make such a statement is abhorrent to our notion that childhood should be golden and sacred. For her to have her youth darkened to this extent is a sacrilege.

And sacrilege is just one tentacle of evil, yet so many who profess to be “religious” – clergy and laymen alike --  turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the venom that flows from the White House on a daily and even hourly basis. Have we become so inured, so immune to this freak of humanity and his unending call to evil that it means less and less the more he repeats it?

In this supposedly holy season of truth and light, a season traditionally so special for our children, how many of them feel the same stirrings of evil and darkness that Storm Reid does? This is a moral disaster, a terrible legacy for the following generations.

Or are too many of our children, also, benumbed by the incessant flow of hate and pettiness from the mouth of the president of these United States, an office formerly sacred and responsible to all the citizens of this still great nation, but now a platform for the darkest mutterings of a morally unhinged demagogue?

The New Year comes, a time of hope and a traditional time for resolutions. Let those of us still in the moral majority – yes, it does exist --  resolve to work ceaselessly to erase this blight on our proud escutcheon, to ruthlessly cut out this cancer that now infects our body politic and our very way of life.

Let us resolve to make this country again a land where children need not look on its president as “the root of all darkness and evilness.”

That is a terrible heritage to even consider yet alone hear from our next generation.

Let us resolve to make America a nation that God can again bless.