Independence Day

It’s The Fourth of July! Yay! But real Independence Day doesn’t come until November of next year.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was the worst political event of my long life. For the past two and a half years I feel as if I’ve been babysitting a hyperactive 5-year-old who has a hand grenade. No need to go into all the details here. From day one Trump has committed outrage after outrage, so many that there is no time to comment on them all, or rebut his thousands of lies.

I have been shocked, depressed, hopeless and furious by turns. The endless noise from Trump and the right-wing echo chamber that supports him have become a sort of political and cultural tinnitus, that mysterious noise that some people hear, that has no medically discoverable source, but which drives its victims to distraction and won’t go away. Still, as the days and months drone on I have seen that Donald Trump’s actions — his thousands of public lies, his cozying up to dictators and enemies of the United States, his chaotic failure to manage even the most basic functions of government — almost none of it has any meaning in the real world. It’s just that 5-year-old boy doing what kids do: trying to get attention.

So I have hunkered down. He’s a TV game show personality and I can’t be bothered any more to “stay tuned” for his “big reveals.” The damage he has done will take a long time and much hard work to repair (and some of it may never be fixed), but the job can’t start until Trump’s out of office. I intend to work for that exact result in the 2020 election, of course, but for now I have better things to do than to react every day to his juvenile need for attention. Those who agree with me don’t need to be told what a butthead the president is. Those who support Donald Trump are simply not persuadable, notwithstanding all logical argument.

So I’m not joining the fray when I read misguided columnists and commenters, and I’m letting his tweets go unremarked. Because in the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “He’s just not worth it.” *


* Not saying I’ll never respond to anything he does or says. He still has the hand grenade, after all.

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