The Mixed Messenger

Donald Trump, who tweets: “Theatre!” in a crowded fire while home burns, is correct when he says that the nationwide cultural conflagration didn’t start with him, but he appears to have most of America, and the world, wondering and worrying if it will all end with him.

It is a difficult period for any apolitical American (who now ought to fully understand why his precursor was often called out as the “Ugly American”); there is a lack of something vital, call it a moral compass, call it a moral center, call it morality itself; perhaps it's the lack of a unifying national purpose. Whatever label you choose to stick on this chronic disease, there is also a lack of a sincere, intelligent, ethical leadership at many levels of society and its institutions. It is undeniably despoiling and threatening our present and future welfare.

Across the political spectrum from the far left to the far right, staunch supporters and opponents to Trump's so-called "agenda" have begun to express their doubts about his ability as a person, let alone as a sitting President, to govern and guide us out of the dangerous economic and social cultural malaise in which we find ourselves after centuries of painfully slow progress towards realizing an amorphous “American Dream.”

How does a nation whose citizens were bred to be “Individualists”, whether rugged or otherwise, become “Out of Many, One”? Certainly not by condoning bigotry, privilege, or equivocating good and evil, might and right.

We are all of us to blame, of course; and it certainly will take all of us working together to get the ship of state on a correct course before smashing upon the rocks of forever lost potential.