View From Here

By David Mark Greaves

Donald Trump is President-elect of the United States.  It’s a nightmare and it won’t go away.  It is unreal and yet it is fact.  This can change the course of American history, and not for the better, for the country or mankind.

You try and follow Obama’s lead and pretend this is a normal transfer of power, hoping for the best for the good of the country, but Trump’s best efforts are going in the opposite direction.  His personnel choices for his administration have so far been literally terrifying.  They are the foxes in charge of the chicken coop and the rest of the world are the chickens.

With the team Trump’s assembling to populate his administration, of which Rudolph Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and the odious Stephen Bannon are only three of four thousand, the country will be in constant turmoil, struggling against Fascism, rapacious corporations, an on-going war against “Roe vs. Wade” and the inevitable warming of the planet.  Global warming.  It almost sound cozy, certainly on a spring-like November day.  But it means the extinction of species, mass migrations, famine, drought, floods, pestilence, disease, leaving the world that we grew up in as something only seen in Dioramas at a Museum of Natural History exhibit in 2050.   And yet we still have to pretend everything is still normal, make a living and stay healthy while we race to the battlefronts, of which there will be many, saving what we can while working toward the midterm elections.

Moving on from the Apocalypse, maybe it won’t be all that bad, and setting aside the cognitive dissonance caused by trying to reconcile Trump’s promises of cutting taxes, reducing the national debt while simultaneously spending the billions needed for infrastructure jobs, we have to see how that spending can be used to build our communities.  What constitutes the infrastructure industry, what skills and businesses will be needed, what critical thinking and education levels have to be achieved to play a part? Because so much of infrastructure upgrade and repair will be necessitated by climate change, the new president, previously a climate-change denier, will come around and acknowledge the science “based on new information that came with the office”.  After all, it wasn’t like a principle with him, it was just something people wanted to hear.  Now they want to hear about jobs and Trump wants another four years.

These are going to be some of the “difficult days ahead” that Dr. King spoke about to the sanitation workers of Memphis before his assassination, and we will get through them.  African-Americans need to remember our own history:  In ancient Africa, before Columbus, during the slave trade and how we weathered the terror afterward.  We have triumphed over many horrors and we will overcome this one as well.