Carnage continues

The one thing that has really stuck with me for the past seven years or so is the phrase "American carnage."

That was the wrongful view former president Donald Trump offered us in his dispiriting inaugural address in 2016. I had no clue there was such a thing as American carnage, but as things turned out, that's pretty much what we have now. So Trump wasn't actually describing something that we were living through prior to 2016. It was, in my view, a miasma that he personally ushered into our society.

Carnage became the template for his administration. We live with it still. We are severely divided as a nation, between blue and red, rural and urban, black and white, the Second Amendment and gun control, (National) Christianity and just about every other religion there is.

And to my mind, there is a single thread that stitches all of this together: Trump.

You know. The guy who just recently became the first former president to ever be indicted. The guy who separated infants from their families as policy to stop illegal immigration; the guy who gave us Operation Warp Speed to bring Covid vaccinations to the country, then downplayed the importance of vaccinations in the first place as hundreds of thousands of his followers died; the guy who hijacked the formerly honorable Republican party and turned it into a cult of personality and a party of grievance and retribution with no interest in actual legislation; the guy who incited an insurrection where police officers were injured or killed; the guy who called for the suspension of the U.S. Constitution while pleading the Fifth Amendment himself more than 400 times during a recent fraud deposition in January; the guy who put enough conservative judges on the Supreme Court to overturn 50 years of Roe v. Wade, thus putting the lives of thousands of women in jeopardy; the guy who tried to dismantle NATO and blackmail Ukraine, which led directly to the Russian invasion of that country; the guy who claims the Black prosecutors in his cases are racist but never himself; the guy who calls for voter suppression by eliminating mail-in ballots while using them himself.

And that's only the ones I can think of on a Sunday morning.

Meanwhile, the carnage continues. It continues in front of our very eyes. 

So the question lingers: are our eyes open? Or are they closed?