Sunday thought: The extremes of the human species

Friends,

Even at 80 years old, she was still bringing Americans together. At 80, he continues to tear us apart.

She always stood for the underdog. He stands for the overlord. She was among the most generous people in American public life. He is the most self-centered. Hers was a voice of clarity, courage, and hope. His is the voice of cruelty, corruption, and incompetence.

If you line up the human species from most admirable to least, she’d be among the first; he’d be among the last.

Sadly, she is no longer with us. Sadly, he is.

This week he took to his Truth Social media to share an AI-generated illustration of himself walking arm in arm with her around the White House (see above). “I knew her a little bit,” he boasted on Glenn Beck’s radio show. “She really liked me, I will tell you!” at which Beck laughed out loud.

Most of the people I meet around this country are more like her than him. Americans are kind, friendly, empathic, optimistic. We want to protect the vulnerable and comfort the afflicted.

We’ve given refuge to those fleeing violence and persecution. We’ve aspired to equal opportunity for the disadvantaged, help for the destitute. We’ve given louder voices to those who’d otherwise not be heard. We’ve been a beacon of hope in the world.

These ideals are embedded in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Emma Lazarus’s poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty, FDR’s second inaugural address, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

We haven’t lived up to them, of course. There’s always been a dark side to America — a part of our soul that exemplifies him rather than her. We’ve been intolerant and bigoted. We’ve supported dictators. Earlier on we enslaved and engaged in genocide.

But most of us aren’t proud of that dark side. We’ve been proudest of our ideals.

So why did we elect him president again? Everyone has a view: Joe Biden should have exited the stage sooner, Democrats should have had a mini-primary, Kamala Harris wasn’t the best candidate, Trump cheated, and so on.

The deeper reason, I think, started several decades ago when those who had accumulated a great deal of power and wealth began to change America.

They destroyed the basic bargain at the heart of our economy: that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you’d do well and your children would do even better. Since the late 1970s, some $80 trillion has been siphoned from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the richest 1 percent.

Yet they got us to blame each other for our struggles rather than look upward and see where all the power and wealth had gone.

Trump gave voice to the scapegoating — blaming undocumented workers, the “deep state,” transgender people, Latinos, Black people, “communists,” Muslims, and Democrats. Now even Canada! All along, he’s been the mainstay of big money, the tribune of the wealthy and powerful.

But his power is now waning. Americans are seeing where he and the dark side have led us — to another unending war, to higher prices and lower wages, to cruel and brutal mass deportations.

We are finally looking upward and realizing where the power and wealth have gone.

We will have an election in just over nine weeks. It will give us a chance to correct some of this — not just constrain him but also start the long and difficult process of rebuilding the nation toward the ideals we’re most proud of, and which she exemplified.

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