One of the most foolish conceits of pundits and pond skimmers is believing that the future is completely open.
“The future is unknowable and unwritten” is a half-truth that ensures people are unprepared for the point on the trajectory when gravity takes over. The distant future may be unknowable, but the near future is partially written.
Driving across the United States, there are places in Wyoming where you can see for tens of miles across the rolling hills at the edge of the Rockies.
I stopped and watched a train coming down a steep slope from perhaps 20 miles away, and conducted a thought experiment by imagining I knew that a section of track was out that the engineer and everyone else didn’t.
Though it might take the train five minutes to reach the spot, would you say, “What’s going to happen is completely unknowable and unwritten?” Of course not. The train will crash, and nothing is going to stop it.
This thought experiment came to mind today when I heard Trump had appointed the maleficent Stephen Miller to be his new chief of staff. He elevated the darkest conduit of America’s collective darkness to the most important post in the executive branch.
Miller will now be gatekeeper to domestic and foreign policy, and to Trump’s addled brain. Appointing him chief of staff amounts to Trump giving his fat little middle finger to the American people after the drubbing he and the sycophantic Republicans took on Tuesday.
It’s also a sign that the deranged president and his henchmen don’t care if they cause a derailment, which makes it all but inevitable.
The old saying, “Be careful what you wish for, you may get it,” now applies to the Democrats. They won by personalizing the midterms, making it about the price of gas rather than the cost of gaslighting.
Now they not only have to stop Trump, they have to quickly provide the benefits to “me and mine” that most Americans only care about.
So it’s a litmus test of whether the people’s self-absorbed issue of “affordability” is as far as their discontent goes. There’s still enough track, even if a crash is inevitable, for Americans to ask ourselves: Is the depravity and brutality of the Gestapo-like architect of ICE’s rampage across the backs of immigrants in the United States part of the revulsion and rejection of Trumpism?
Looking solely through a national lens in a global society is like watching the world go by from a basement apartment in a big city. As goes Trump’s domestic policy, so goes his foreign policy.
It’s true that “American citizens rose up and showed the world their nation’s truer colors.” But the dark shadows over the land haven’t suddenly disappeared. Nor has the gray numbness of spirit that gave rise to Trump, which he and his ilk did not cause but catalyzed.
Is it true that “the people” have “taken a hard look at what’s become of the nation and roared a thunderous ‘NO!’”? In other words, is there a strong inward element to it, or is it just about gas prices?
Floating in bubbles of idealism and saying, “kindness has driven out cruelty,” is premature, if not dangerously optimistic where the USA is concerned. Even if a new spirit of decency and kindness is blowing like a breath of fresh air through the land, Trump has shown, by elevating Miller, that he will double down on the worst of his administration’s many evils.
Without inviting the tired trope of antisemitism, Netanyahu is still the genocidal prime minister of Israel, as Trump is still the president of the U.S. And if Trump’s promotion of Miller is any indication, he’ll double down with his Israeli blood brother on their needless war against Iran. He’s already abandoned Ukraine to his villainous mentor in the Kremlin, and may well turn his glassy eyes toward Cuba.
After all, the self-named “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth, ominously said yesterday, “We don’t back down,” and “We will defend [ourselves] against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
Of all the evils that Trump and his henchmen and henchwomen have perpetrated, the worst is the deliberate attempt to destroy the viability and diversity of life on Earth for future generations.
COP31, which opens in Turkey on Nov. 9, comes at this propitious and perilous moment of great peril for the planet and people. The reelection of Lula da Silva in Brazil, over the son of a Bolsonaro, as well as the elections in Serbia, are possibly (feet on the ground!) signs not of a “blue wave” but the beginning of a true wave globally.
However, it’s essential to realize that people like Trump and Miller, Putin and Xi are not the sources of man’s collective darkness, but expressions of and conduits for it. To truly prevail over power and people like them, as well as the economic powers that be that are their bedfellows, enough human beings have to stop externalizing darkness and face and own our own inseparable portion of it.
The real question is not “whether, come January when they control Congress, Democrats will take advantage of the new populism to enact measures most Americans need.”
Since “all social and economic revolutions are reactions and a modified continuity of what has been,” the real question is whether this collective “NO!” to Trumpism represents the beginnings of something much deeper: A revolution in human consciousness itself.
Prepare for the worst, and the best.
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