Camp is away this week so I get to whistle in the dark on my own. From all the subjects I could choose I keep coming back to the one that affects us all. 

Just a year ago the US elected Donald Trump as their president and both houses of Congress went to the Republicans. What I still fail to understand to this day are the 70+ million people who thought that these guys would make their lives better, improve healthcare, education, fairer taxes and solve the immigration and assimilation problems. 

Fast forward. We have troops deployed in Portland, Chicago, Washington DC, New Orleans and promises of National Guard deployment to several other Democratic run states and cities. We have ICE roaming the country, harassing and profiling, arresting and deporting anybody they (don’t) like. Just like the Gestapo and the SS. Not much different. Convicted criminals are being pardoned while judges and prosecutors who ruled against Trump are indicted and charged. 

The world trade system is upended, international agreements and agencies like the Climate Change Agreement or the International Criminal Court, scuttled and cancelled. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine reduced to Nobel Peace Prize aspirations. Border security now includes anyone who enters the US being photographed and for longer than 30 days fingerprinted. 

Trump betrayed friends and allies like Canada and Mexico, imposed punishing tariffs on anybody that doesn’t want to dance with him and instead cozied up to autocrats like Victor Orban, Recep Erdogan as well as the convicted ex-president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro and El Salvador’s crypto king and jailer, Nayib Bukele. Not to mention Putin and Saudis ruler MbS, Mohammed bin Salman, Trump’s new best friend. 

Trump (with the approval of Congress) has appointed extremely unfit people like Peter Hegseth, a former FOX newscaster, to the head of the pentagon, renamed by him as the Ministry of War; Kristi Noem as head of Homeland Security, a climate change, abortion and vaccine denier and like her boss she has claimed to be divinely called to office.Robert F. Kennedy J. who believes autism is caused by Tylenol during pregnancy and childhood vaccines should not be mandatory. He wants to Make America Healthy Again.  All of these people are not only incompetent, they lack a moral compass altogether.

Trump always hated the media which reported the facts. Like the lost election, the attack on the Capitol, the Epstein friendship etc. but now he has created a ‘Hall of Shame’ in his latest effort to pillory the media and journalists that are critical of him or his administration. He’s always been a petulant, childish loser so this is just another attention grabber to take the spotlight off the increasingly fractured and beleaguered country he is supposed to lead. Anybody should be honoured to be on his ‘offender of the week’ roll. 

What a difference a year makes.

I still think Kamala Harris would have made a decent president. She seemed honest, smart, joyful and knew the ins and outs of the beltway. She was an advocate for minorities; as a former prosecutor she could tell the good from the bad guys and she had human qualities that are completely missing in Trump like compassion, common sense and empathy for the less privileged. We would be living in a different world now. Instead, we’ve gone the opposite way, toward a darker place where neighbours are suspicious of each other, long-time residents are hiding because they are afraid of being harassed and deported and the rich get richer while the poor have no chance to get out of their predicament. 

While ordinary citizen will pay the tariffs on all the imports; the health subsidies for millions will expire in January and tax cuts for the top 1% will be enshrined. Fear and mistrust have replaced decency and facts while conspiracies abound and misinformation comes right from the highest office in the land. The ascendant Christian militancy, sanctioned by the almighty both in the White House and in Heaven, embraces an extreme and exclusive philosophy, not the tolerant, turn-the-other-cheek forgiving kind but one which fundamentally believes in biblical metaphors like hell and heaven and Armageddon which apparently is just around the corner. Maybe we’re already in it.

The only chance for a better world is in the hands of today’s youth. Will they realize that it takes a community to ensure a safe environment for all, not a gun totting individualism that fosters only division and mistrust because that philosophy has only winners and losers. Do the young understand that the world is theirs to shape and that they have inherited the best and the worst from their parents and grandparents’ generation. In youth I must trust because they are the only future we have.