Trump is exactly what America needs

Equal Pay Day yesterday deserved a post. Something to address the crushing idiocy that women would have to work these extra months into 2018 to earn as much as men did in 2017. But all the words felt heavy and negative, scalded by incredulity and scraped with helplessness, so when busyness rose up to eat the day I didn’t really mind.

 

I hoped today would be different. No longer earning last year’s wages, we could look forward. But today too I typed “outrage, astonishing vileness, repugnant team of supervillains, etc.” So let’s skip all of that, because you already know it. (And if you don’t, there’s a reason.)

 

So where’s the hope? It’s right behind us. In the awoken minds of millennials. In the shaken complacency of Generation Xers. In the tired tiger of Baby Boomers. Faux News and modern anesthetics are powerful tools, but in the end, we humans care. And we think. And this level of executive degeneracy is unacceptable.

 

(For a remarkably lucid and convincing discussion of how we can go from right-wing sabotage and self-interest to the birth of real progress, check out this guy’s article “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War” which shows how exactly that progress happened in California, and how it can/will happen in the nation as a whole soon.)

 

So today, trying to earn 2018’s dollars and sanity, I hold the conviction, desperate and dire, that a huge swing back to sanity is growing behind the screen of Trump’s villainy. That the fecal stench of his immorality is just what fertilizer smells like.

 

And in the meantime, as science cures diseases at a remarkable clip, environmental awareness is no longer dismissed as “hippy,” and social justice movements are fundamentally improving what’s considered acceptable, things are better than they’ve ever been before. Precisely because they’ve been so bad. We just need to dig ourselves out of this last stage.

 

So I’ll read the next headline of Trump immorality, and along with the outrage I’ll remind myself that he’s just adding rocks to the bag that needs to sink. And it will. And in the meantime, my lovely neighbors are coming home, I’m packing a bag to go rock climb with my fantastic friends, and I am framed at the leading edge of a long series of loving weekends.

 

Life is good. And getting better. Happy future, my friends!