We are in a time freighted with darkness and fear and we are also in a time blessed with fresh light and hope. It is Dickens' best of times and worst of times.
America has seen terrible crucibles in the past, the Civil War the bloodiest and cruelest, but what we face today in Donald Trump is a man to whom the lessons of history and change are to be ignored or – worse – to be bent and warped to his tunnel vision of darkness and fear.
The White House has become the Dark House under a falsely-elected monster bent on destroying the pillars of our democracy and society so carefully crafted by our founding fathers centuries ago. There is treason afoot at the highest levels of our government, rampant and ongoing, and its handmaidens are the corruption and its stink that are being exposed on a regular and heart-breaking basis.
Donald Trump is the culmination and the fulmination of the worst and most base of an American society whose original sin of slavery and its indelibly racist heritage make it even more susceptible to the spell of a shadowy charlatan. Trump's instinct toward evil and amorality, coupled with the naked power at his command, have pointed a significant portion of this country's citizens down a path of tribalism, hatred, and deep racism. Trump's path is one of ultimate calamity, ending in the destruction of this lengthy and worthy experiment in democracy, for all its faults the most successful in history.
But another path is being blazed through the swampy tangle that Trump has nurtured. The voice of its people is being heard throughout this still proud and defiant land, and they are moving America away from the darkness and back into the light of reason and patriotism. The recent mid-term elections were a voice and an answer, a groundswell of affirmation and hope. The machinery of accountability was made whole again in great measure and while the wheels of justice turn slowly, they still turn, inexorably and finally. There is great hope in that one statement.
Of great hope, too, is the tide of new and fresh faces elected into the democracy of government. So many are women, which is only as it should be because the old white men who have heretofore commanded the direction of government and society have brought us to this totally unseemly pass in our history.
The day after Trump was inaugurated, it was women who instinctively took to the streets, sensing and reacting to an incipient evil they saw spreading across the land.
And it is a woman who has brought Donald Trump literally to hand and who will continue to challenge him and champion the true will of the republic. She and her colleagues, both male and the new and bold women, will not go gentle into any dark night that Trump might invoke.
His is a death force. Theirs is a life force.
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