The Future Revisited

There are many possible futures we can envision for ourselves and, more importantly, for our children.   As sentient beings in this remarkable country on this beleaguered planet, we seem to have chosen a President, his name Donald Trump, whose vision, if it becomes reality, would effectively lead us to a society bleak in character, conformist in attitude, devoid of compassion and imagination, full of hate, bigotry and intolerance and prone to indiscriminate and senseless violence.

This view of the future does not come from my own imagining but directly from the ideas expressed by the man himself and espoused by those who follow him.  This deeply disturbed, lonely and essentially unhappy human being – apparently devoid of even the most elemental compassion and humility - has on various occasions and in the starkest of terms –

• Belittled the appearance and character of those women who had the temerity to oppose him
• Attempted to berate and mimic the physical behavior of the disabled over which they have no control
• Stretched the truth to the point that it has become a poor representation of its former self
• Maligned the entire religion of Islam whose numbers exceed one and one-half billion people
• Effectively fashioned undocumented migrants into the primary domestic enemy of the American people to be feared and persecuted as essentially less than human.  He has vowed to get “rid of them all.”
• Has suggested using violence against those who oppose him
• Alluded to his own self-congratulatory sexual prowess and inherent manliness
• Represented himself on numerous occasions as the one person capable of fixing what is, in reality, not even broken.  He has never suggested that he is even capable of error and responds to any suggestion that he may have been mistaken with childish hostility
• Attempted to humiliate those whose intellect far overshadows his own
• Made a mockery of science especially in regards to climate change and envisions no place for science within the purview and authority of his position as President.
• Expressed a vision of fortress America surrounded by “impenetrable” walls and buoyed up by an over-inflated military that will effectively diminish if not obliterate the ever-disappearing social safety net.

As sentient beings in this remarkable country on this beleaguered planet in the midst of the 21^st century, do we really want such a future for ourselves and our children where the natural environment will eventually expose our collective neglect and put all of humanity at risk?

Do we really want a future for ourselves and our children where a two-tiered society will be very much in evidence in which a very small percentage of the entire population holds almost all the wealth and wields all the effective power?  This reality is not far from fruition – all one has to do is to examine the actual statistics and the current economic trends.

Do we really want a future for ourselves and our children where conformity and intolerance represent the ideal and there is no compassion for the many who suffer needlessly – the homeless, the sick, the deeply impoverished, the hungry, the mentally ill and all who do not fall within the favored whiteness of the “chosen?”

Do we really want a future for ourselves and our children within the boundaries of a Police State where our borders are secured from all incursions?  Such a society will become, by necessity, absent of imagination, bereft of the truth and beholding to the darkest aspects of the human character.

Do we really want to live in such a place?

I am profoundly convinced that love, compassion, intelligence, reason and generosity of the spirit are the best politics and represent the route to our true salvation.  Without these qualities in the forefront of our intentions and our collective imagination, we are all truly lost.