“Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”
—Thomas Paine
For those of you who may not be familiar with who Thomas Paine was, he played a very significant role in the launching of The American Revolution.
Just when we need our Reasoning faculties more desperately than ever due to the Coronavirus pandemic & our collective response to it, we have a cretin (a stupid, vulgar, or insensitive person) sitting behind the desk in the oval office with about as much “reason” as a Pet Rock.
Not just America but all of humanity needs to come together to defeat this virus but tragically, our reasoning capabilities have been replaced by irrational hatred and racism in far too many of us.
And Robber Barons like Trump have manipulated peoples’ herd mentality into an inhuman mob. Because a fake businessman played a successful real estate tycoon on a “reality” T.V. show that duped its viewers into believing anything he says.
Trump has succeeded beyond our worst nightmares! He tells his cult followers to not believe their own eyes or ears but only him & a third of the American public have fallen for it because “reason” fell out of fashion a long time ago.
The three years that Trump has been in office has proven to be a reign of error & terror. Terror for the suffering immigrants locked up like animals in the arena of farce & spectacle.
And now the whole world is beginning to get an idea of what those poor immigrants feel like. But who’s in charge of leading our nation in this crisis, a petty & childish man-boy who has put all of America at a much greater risk of getting the virus because of his vanity & colossal ignorance!
Moreover, the Silicon Valley idiot-savants who promised us a New Age of solidarity, instead sold us out. The “social media” has morphed us into a nation of isolated & alienated individuals who have persuaded themselves into believing that they are well-rounded wonderful social beings with thousands of “friends.”
People who’ve fallen for the techno/social babble and think they’re communicating by adding “happy faces” to their often-incoherent sentence fragments like Donald Duck, their president.
Anti-intellectualism has become chic among the climate deniers. And as our world’s climate is dying around us, these indoctrinated onlookers look to Dr. Donald Strangelove who like Slim Pickens, is riding a nuclear missile down to Armageddon!
Trump tells the herd, Don’t Worry, Be Happy because it’s all a hoax & I’m making America great again one dead body at a time. Approximately 20 years ago, I watched my first & last episode of a “reality” T.V. show. It was the series, “Survivor,” I believe? I said to my wife, to “survive” on this show, you have to ignore any principles we were taught as we grew up i.e. honesty, sympathy, fairness, etc. And this “reality” show tells people that the world is cut-throat & everyone is a threat and a competitor. So, backstabbing, lying, cheating, etc. are not only okay but what you must do to “survive” or win.
Little did I know that 20 years later, the plethora of these crappy “reality” T.V. shows would vomit up a Trump. I only knew that I didn’t accept their premises so I wouldn’t watch them. It’s little wonder Donny became a fake celebrity on a fake T.V. show because he has all the negative traits of backstabbing, con man, thief, etc. And he knows all about “fake news,” because he’s a master of it.
From the beginning of his career, he built his “success” on fake news stories he’d get his friends to post in the media. He’d even call in to radio shows & pretend to be someone else & sing his own praises. Things haven’t changed much.
This pandemic is reminding us of a true reality, the reality that we must all cooperate & care about our fellow men because our survival depends on it!
Perhaps this would be a good point at which to remind you of the definition of “reason?” (a statement offered in explanation or justification; a rational ground or motive; the thing that makes some fact intelligible; a sufficient ground of explanation or of logical defense; the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways; proper exercise of the mind; sanity; the sum of the intellectual powers)
If you haven’t downed all of Trump’s Kool Aid, you might care to reflect on Trump’s record over the past three years with these definitions of reason in mind?
FOX “News” (America’s equivalent to Russia’s Pravda & which I dubbed the fear & hate channel, several years ago) played a very significant role in providing the fertilizer for the soil which has led to the growth of willful ignorance in America. And Trump blossomed in this garden of evil, hate, & violence against the weak & vulnerable convenient scapegoats he rose to power in.
FOX viewers are indoctrinated into Trump’s, Mitch McConnel’s, Rush Limbaugh’s, etc. dystopian & paranoid and imaginary worldview where truth & facts are whatever they say they are. So, probably a good chunk of Trump’s Walking Dead as well as many “Christian” evangelicals are still clinging to their faith in Trump & denial of scientific fact. This wouldn’t be so terrifying were it not for the fact that they are now becoming a real threat to our collective well-being because they will be carriers & help to hasten the spread of this deadly virus.
Trump’s harvest of fear & hate will eventually produce the reality of his mind-boggling incompetence & ignorance which is slowly coming to fruition. We’re only at the beginning of this world-wide nightmare & because of Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan’s standard modus operandi, Deny, Divert, & Detract, perhaps millions of Americans who wouldn’t have died if he had an ounce of reason or compassion, will probably die. And when that time comes, not even the stupidest amongst us will be able to deny or ignore the horrific reality this fake scumbag helped to cause.
We’ve run out of time & every minute we delay may prove fatal. We, you, I, us, need to unite & to first of all shut the phony, lying moron in the White House up! We need to rediscover those principles the “reality” T.V. shows made us forget i.e. love, truth, compassion, empathy, trust, equality, fairness, etc.
United we Stand, Divided we Fall!
Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, Oregon March 21, 2020