First of all I hope you are enjoying your Labor Day. Unfortunately way too many people still have to work. As always something is wrong with that picture.
Trump constantly does something to inflame tensions and passions, then says all these people are law breakers when they go out and protest what his words represent. Now unfortunately there are a few outliers who do riot and loot, but they are not the protesters. Trump though gets to use the outliers to push his law and order campaign (which for him is one big misnomer since he is breaking more laws daily than any other President in history).
He screams about how bad the protesters are to inflame his people and hopefully scare enough people in believing he needs to stay President to prevent these people from destroying their towns.
Then more people protest what he does, more stuff happens and he goes right back to we need to protect the cities from all this unlawfulness. He inflames racial tensions, adds to the feedback loop and it keeps growing.
Then many of us watch all this madness with disbelief. People are caught watching and not responding. And for people in general, many want someone to blame and Trump is great at pointing fingers to control the narrative. Why for so long he has gotten away with this, is one giant study in psychology somewhere down the line.
Still it leaves us with this growing ugly feedback loop that no one, not even Trump will soon be able to control. And right now there are no immediate solutions, so lets look at possible root causes to hopefully start redirecting our actions.
So is the root cause:
a) he knows if he leaves office he is going to jail and is desperately trying to find a way to stay in office
b) he really is a monstrous racist and can barely hide it anymore
c) Putin has him lock stock and barrel and is convincing Trump to turn this country upside down so Putin can say Western Democracy doesn’t work and destroy us completely.
d) Trump is his own dictator and thinks turning 1/3 of the country against the rest of it is his only way to achieve this goal
e) Trump really doesn’t know what he is doing
f) some combination of the above
g) he honestly believes that he is doing the right thing (it is that damn perspective thing)
And I just posted all this knowing that we should not belittle or denigrate others, so oops, but at times you have to address the issue as best you can. And I struggle because I do not think I am belittling him as a person, but what he is doing, but are they equal? Or is it hand in hand?
Now for the second half of this situation. I do not know any specific answers except a general one. And I was hinted at it this morning. I went to the grocery store this morning and as I was walking around I heard over the intercom from one of those automated pages: Matthew 12 13 Matthew 12 13 and I joked to myself that sounds like a Bible verse. I looked it up.
From the New American Bible “Then he said to the man,”stretch out your hand”. He stretched it out, and it was restored as sound as the other.”
So obviously this comes from a story of healing. Now it is the story of one man being healed, however it seems to me you can apply it to our country. We need to stretch out our hands and restore both hands or the whole of the country. Is this a direct application of this story from the Bible? Nope. It does say something to us though. How do we stretch out our hands to those who are falling for Trump’s words of hate? I do not know, but finding that can be a beginning to start the healing.
Stay safe today
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