“Four years,” comes a voice from the middle of the line.
Four years ago seems like Ozzie and Harriet; we had no real idea of the havoc and devastation Trump would wreak on Americans and the institutions that have sustained this country up until his dizzying and treasonous assault.
From his inaugural address, a dark portrait of the American carnage that he predicted and has made come to pass, to his reckless threats to international peace, there was always the perceived threat that when his back was against the final wall, he would invoke a war as a way out. We feared that he would sacrifice American lives to his political life and ambition.
He has. The pandemic that he says is not his responsibility could possibly kill a million Americans if Donald Trump is not replaced. At this writing, a new daily COVID 19 record has been set – and so-called “Trump Country” is where the pandemic is now reaping the most lives.
Trump has withdrawn from the pandemic war that is indeed his total responsibility, urging now that only the most vulnerable be protected and that the rest of America can go on dying until we have reached his impossible nirvana of “herd immunity.”
As November 3 ticks inexorably closer, a symbolic day of reckoning that is fraught with every fear – paranoid and real – of a Trump victory, this mad dog of a president hysterically dashes from crucial state to crucial state, holding superspreader rallies for his death-enchanted followers.
Martin Luther King's dictum that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” will be severely tested on November 3 – and probably long after that – and many Americans, racked almost to ruin by Trump and the pandemic, have been overwhelmed by a sense of frustration and helplessness that has left us reeling as a nation.
The days are few now until America's final reckoning. Can we summon the moral rectitude to take back what is left of America and begin to rebuild all that Trump and his accomplices have torn down? Can we, quite literally, survive?
The air is fraught with both hope and fear – hope that justice will prevail and fear that the great American democratic experiment has failed both the country and it people. There are almost endless cases to be made for both outcomes. The travesty of 2016 resounds as a reminder that a totally unfit criminal can become the “leader” of America and have his crazed way with destroying its very foundations.
November 3 looms. In Philadelphia, Proud Boys and police shared pizza at the Fraternal Order of Police headquarters. Are we that far gone? Has the evil that has infested the Department of Justice with William Barr seeped down to everyday police? Has Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley recovered his moral equilibrium after trailing Trump like a puppy as he marched to St. John's church to defile the Bible?
So many vital questions will be answered next week and probably weeks beyond that. America is in the balance.
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