This Friday, Donald Trump will climb up some steps in front of a big white building with a big dome on it, put his hand on a bible and after uttering some words that make little sense to anybody who isn't American, becomes the 45th President of the United States of America. He gets to do so because he won the Presidential Election which was held late last year. All seems pretty straightforward and fair enough to me so far. Not that you'd know it.
Six days after Trump's election, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth that would have made you think that they'd elected Donald Duck rather than Donald Trump, the world press were
reviewing their comprehension of what the people of their own countries
really want. The polls predicting a Hillary Clinton win were blind to reality.
And the reality is that working class people, and nationals of each
country, are fed up with being forced to be part of a system of globalism that
doesn't include them, the working poor, with traditional values.
The working class
feels that 'globalization' and a tender hearted response to refugees are
values that don't include them - the base of each of their countries.
Why should a working class person feel that Uganda and Lybia and Ecuador
should be aided when working class people live under the same daily
pressures? And why shouldn't a
country's borders keep out others? That's why a home has a fence and a
locking front door. Being theatrically concerned with the plight of
others is a false concern, when one doesn't have the power to help those
others. The IMF or World Bank may have the power to help such people,
but not a wage slave who is month by month in danger of losing their
home.
Liberalism has become an abstraction of compassion,
manipulated by big money just as so called conservatism is an
abstraction for the conservation of the home front first - the farm -
the crops - the nation. Conservative today means rich and predatory.
Perhaps conservatism gained its original meaning from the Depression
days or even from earlier log cabin days. But conservatism isn't
conservation today, it's a blind behind which the wealthy operate to
take money from the only place it exists - other people. Just as
liberalism isn't compassionate in action but only in lip service when
there is no power to back it up.
What is happening with this
global self searching, prompted by Trump's election, is that working
class people are desperate enough to elect a billionaire, even if not intended that way, because he represents them as
outsiders, and shown the little people themselves that they have power.
And that's what a 'progressive' movement wanted. That's what was wanted
by Bernie Sander's revolution. So, is Trump a clown, or does he have any real
shared values with common people and not just star power? Will he
betray the very people who elected him? Time will tell. But the people
that have both voted for him and the ones that are still weeping in the
streets about his election, have gained a self awareness - that the
outsiders have power. That in fact these 'outsiders' are actually the
political body.
Martin Luther King's
words; 'let it be that one day we judge a man by the content of his
character and not by the colour of his skin '- applies as well to sexual
alternatives. Be judged not by your sexual or gender preference but by
the content of your character. Difficult to do so when there is Fukushima, global warming
from carbon emissions and the murderous, predatory wars against small
countries for their oil and resources, as well as poverty and synthetic
and poisonous food production as issues to attend to.
The populism
and nationalism that has just shocked the world with Trump's election,
and that is spreading to other countries, is not necessarily a
celebration of Trump himself, but is the expression of a vast swath of
humanity that has had no representation because liberalism and
conservatism have become hive mentalities divorced from critical human
concerns. Home, family, nation - then world peace - is the natural
sequence of concerns and for which there is no spiffy title like liberal
or conservative.
A liberal trait that is commonly seen as true,
is that an abstract sentimentality for humanism sounds good, but without
the power or the resources to do something about it, is just empty and
self serving lip synch. People have long resented
such lip service without concrete action. To help others we need to
accumulate some strength ourselves. There is one common enemy of
humanity and it's the greed and self service of the plutocracy in whose
shadow we all live. The rich like to be painted as humanistic and
concerned because they have to walk the streets and be photographed for
the magazines. They also like to own the press and divide and conquer
with hollow words like conservative and liberal. But to realistically
help all struggling people and nature, and to accumulate the strength to
do it, we can't eviscerate any one of the components of humanity.
So, we've got four years of the Donald whether we like it or not. Let's let the man get on with the job, however much we may or may not like it, and I can get back to being funny.