Reasons for Optimism Require Creativity, But They Still Exist

Americans who have good attitudes at this point in time deserve our respect.  I ran across this masterpiece this morning, written by the son of an Air Force brigadier general who himself rose to the rank of colonel. Here’s the beginning of a fairly lengthy essay that explains the author’s optimism as follows:

Of my 57 years drawing breath, I’ve spent 51 of them directly or indirectly serving this once great nation. So, as you might imagine, I found myself on Nov. 8, 2016, more than a little dismayed at the news we had elevated Donald J. Trump to the nation’s highest office – a man so clearly unfit to lead America.

But over time I’ve come to appreciate Trump in ways I did not expect. Now, I am thankful that we elected Trump. Because Donald Trump is exactly what America needed. Trump is a mirror, a warning, and ultimately a catalyst for change. Reflected in Trump is all that is wrong with the United States: the injustice of our broken social contract, the crassness of our politics, and the cruelty of our economy. Trump is also the shock that a mature democracy needs for action. To use a timely metaphor, Trump and his supporters are a virus, and they have activated our democratic antibodies. What we are seeing in the streets is the body fighting the infection.

He goes on with a history of how all this went so wrong, dating back to Newt Gingrich in the 1990s whose “Contract with America” laid the groundwork for the Tea Party.

In any case, he believes that this has all risen to a head in the form of today’s criminal insanity that is embodied by Donald Trump, and this has gotten to the point where it’s so absurd as to be unsustainable.  When the purge is complete, he suggests, we’ll be better and stronger for having gone through this madness.

We’ll see.  In any case, it’s hard to find fault with those who don’t share his cheery disposition–those who look at things like the meme above and say, “Look.  It’s time to admit that the United States is simply screwed.  Every day we ask how much more obscenely stupid this nation can become, and every single day the answer is all over social media long before our feet have hit the floor in the morning.”