The Only Winning Move
Thanks to that massive Chinese hoax the rest of the world knows as "climate change," we here in Southern California now face the risk of massive wildfires pretty much all year round. And at the moment, we're being hit harder than we have in years.
I don't know what the TV networks are showing, but I suspect that today at least, the fire getting everyone's attention is the one burning in the Sepulveda Pass, because it's near the Getty Center and all the expensive homes. But that's actually the smallest of the major fires burning. The one here in Ventura County, with smoke seeping through the office windows near me even as I type, is much bigger and has done more damage.
The weather is what got these fires going, and it's also what makes them so hard to put out. Yesterday, the wind was blowing too hard for water-dropping airplanes and helicopters to fly, so the ground crews had to make do on their own. If that keeps up, they may have no choice but just to focus on saving what they can and waiting for the rest to burn itself out.
Which brings me to the thoughts I've been having ever since I got back from my latest trip to Red State America.
An article I read recently suggested that we're "trapped in an abusive relationship with the United States of America," and sometimes that's how I feel. The Trumpocalypse is inflicting trauma on us all, and on some days that's harder to take than on others.
What's especially hard is to see the trauma being inflicted on Trump's own supporters, trauma that they don't even realize. There's a siege mentality, or perhaps a cult mentality, taking hold. Each new Trump failure and embarrassment forces the right-wing media to crank up their lies and their fear-mongering, driving the people who listen to them into a smaller and smaller protective bubble. They're steadily losing their sense of honor and decency. The "moral majority?" Not so much anymore. It wasn't enough to look the other way on lying, stealing and cheating. Now apparently sexual assault and child molestation are okay too, as long as it's by someone from the right tribe. And for what? It's not as if they're getting any material gain out of it. When you make a deal with the devil, at least you get to enjoy something for a little while before the devil takes your soul. Trump voters aren't even going to get that much.
And the hardest thing of all for someone like me. There's. No. Reasoning. With. Them. You can't reason with someone when you have no common foundation of fact to start from. You spend so much time trying to establish what's real that you can never get to discussing what we can do about it. Or at least I can't. I hope someone else is having better luck.
So yes, the Trumpocalypse is very much like the fires burning all around me right now. And the Trump supporters are like those who didn't clear the brush around their homes, or who left their cars parked on the narrow streets and blocked the fire trucks from getting to them. There's nothing you can do to keep the fire from consuming them. There's not much we can do to stop an awful lot from being caught in the blaze, either. The wind is too strong right now. We just have to save what we can and wait for this madness to burn itself out. It's the only winning move we have at the moment, or at least the only one I can see.
But that's not nothing. Just ask the homeowner whose house is miraculously saved in the middle of the blaze. Small victories are still victories. Small victories give us a starting point when it's time to build something new. The firefighters here in Southern California aren't giving up, and neither should we. There's a lot of good to be done.
I don't know what the TV networks are showing, but I suspect that today at least, the fire getting everyone's attention is the one burning in the Sepulveda Pass, because it's near the Getty Center and all the expensive homes. But that's actually the smallest of the major fires burning. The one here in Ventura County, with smoke seeping through the office windows near me even as I type, is much bigger and has done more damage.
The weather is what got these fires going, and it's also what makes them so hard to put out. Yesterday, the wind was blowing too hard for water-dropping airplanes and helicopters to fly, so the ground crews had to make do on their own. If that keeps up, they may have no choice but just to focus on saving what they can and waiting for the rest to burn itself out.
Which brings me to the thoughts I've been having ever since I got back from my latest trip to Red State America.
An article I read recently suggested that we're "trapped in an abusive relationship with the United States of America," and sometimes that's how I feel. The Trumpocalypse is inflicting trauma on us all, and on some days that's harder to take than on others.
What's especially hard is to see the trauma being inflicted on Trump's own supporters, trauma that they don't even realize. There's a siege mentality, or perhaps a cult mentality, taking hold. Each new Trump failure and embarrassment forces the right-wing media to crank up their lies and their fear-mongering, driving the people who listen to them into a smaller and smaller protective bubble. They're steadily losing their sense of honor and decency. The "moral majority?" Not so much anymore. It wasn't enough to look the other way on lying, stealing and cheating. Now apparently sexual assault and child molestation are okay too, as long as it's by someone from the right tribe. And for what? It's not as if they're getting any material gain out of it. When you make a deal with the devil, at least you get to enjoy something for a little while before the devil takes your soul. Trump voters aren't even going to get that much.
And the hardest thing of all for someone like me. There's. No. Reasoning. With. Them. You can't reason with someone when you have no common foundation of fact to start from. You spend so much time trying to establish what's real that you can never get to discussing what we can do about it. Or at least I can't. I hope someone else is having better luck.
So yes, the Trumpocalypse is very much like the fires burning all around me right now. And the Trump supporters are like those who didn't clear the brush around their homes, or who left their cars parked on the narrow streets and blocked the fire trucks from getting to them. There's nothing you can do to keep the fire from consuming them. There's not much we can do to stop an awful lot from being caught in the blaze, either. The wind is too strong right now. We just have to save what we can and wait for this madness to burn itself out. It's the only winning move we have at the moment, or at least the only one I can see.
But that's not nothing. Just ask the homeowner whose house is miraculously saved in the middle of the blaze. Small victories are still victories. Small victories give us a starting point when it's time to build something new. The firefighters here in Southern California aren't giving up, and neither should we. There's a lot of good to be done.
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