“Desperate sadness” pretty well describes the mood that has predominated for me from the moment Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Most of the time, this percolates below the surface, mainly because I put my hardhat on every day and go to work to do what I can to rectify the situation. This usually staves off the sense of helplessness, but not always. These days, I have other things to be desperate and sad about, but it always comes back to the president. The condition I find my country in today is not an anomaly. It’s more like the physical manifestation of the spiritual rot that I’ve observed every day for almost four years. I can’t say it was inevitable, because who knows when a novel virus will emerge? But it is the unavoidable consequence of putting a man like Trump in charge and of letting people like Mitch McConnell control the U.S. Senate. What we’re witnessing is merely the implicit becoming visible so that even foreigners can witness it.
American football is an exceptional sport, admired if not always appreciated around the world. And the National Football League is a well-oiled machine and moneymaker. In this, the sport is a good analogy for the country as a whole. But if you take some out-of-shape sociopath off the street and ask him to quarterback the New York Jets, the New York Jets are not just going to do badly… they’re going to do exceptionally badly.
This isn’t complicated, or it shouldn’t be. Electing Trump was the entire nation deciding to stop doing whatever it was doing and stop being whatever it was, and instead just start punching itself in the face all day, every day, in perpetuity, until somehow it ends. Continue reading.