Buffalo Hunters: Trump and Our Presidency

I wrote this over a year ago, in the reflective hours just after Donald Trump won the Electoral College. If anything, the words are more resonant today. Buffalo Hunters The biggest hope I heard expressed these post-election days is that Donald Trump did not mean what he said, and that he will not do the things he said he wants to do. I know that drawing a parallel to the world of 1933, specifically Germany, is considered the last resort of poor argument. Still, looking back begs the issue of what lies ahead. Katherine Anne Porter wrote a novel in 1962 entitled Ship of Fools, about the passengers and crew aboard a cruise ship headed from Mexico to Germany in 1933 just as the Nazis have taken control of the German government. This situation back home is a major topic of conversation and concern. Several of the passengers are Jewish, and they know the rhetoric of hate spewed out by those who now have taken power toward the Jewish people. One of them says to another, “What are they going to do? Kill us all?” I have heard the rhetoric of hate spewed out by the Trump campaign. “It can't happen here,” is another favorite phrase uttered by those who believe someone else will protect them. I ask you to be a protector, in case. Do not for a moment relent. Do not for a moment think Trump can't possibly mean it. Do not for a moment relax your guard believing that one man cannot take full control of America. It can happen; dystopian stories of the past several years are clear on this point, and art too often comes in ahead of life. There are signs to watch for, such as the demonizing of the Press, and calling anyone who disagrees a traitor, or a cancer. The system may right itself, but most Anericans don't trust it to do so, which is in part why Trump was “selected.” He was not elected. He did not win the vote. He has no clear mandate from the people other than this: we are all dissatisfied with the status quo. We Americans tend to forget our own history, or worse, most of us do not know it. We have a powerful mythology of freedom, but our freedom has come at a great price, in hard fights, one by one since our Founding Fathers set up a democracy that excluded everyone but the landed gentry from the vote. We have suppported dictatorships and still do. We have attacked and invaded countries smaller and weaker than ourselves, sometimes to ill result. We have oppressed people on our soil and outside it, and sytemmatically and intentionally caused the near-extinction of one of our most magnificent creatures, the American Bison, then made it a symbol of our greatness. We are not the noble people we think we are. But we could be. We are, it seems, at a crossroads. We have two roads to choose from, one that leads forward and continues the fight for economic and political freedom; the other that tries to go back to a time imagined to exist that was less complicated but also much less free. We have veered off our path, but, as Englishman Robert Plant famously sang, there's still time to change the road you're on. Remember, they can kill us all. And we are they.