Donald Trump’s All Star Barnstorming Travelling Medicine Show is approaching its one-month milestone. And I think it’s fair to say its hallmark is that he keeps the hand grenades flying and that keeps his opponents off balance. And kudos to him and his all stars for all their good work. Bravo.
What that made me think of was how for the last fifty years our leaders have been keeping us off balance with one crisis after another. There’s always another war or a banking crisis or stagflation, or COVID or Climate Change or civil rights or women’s rights or gay rights or you name it. For all of my adult life we have had to forget about normalcy and prosperity and instead we had to give up our rights or our way of life or mortgage our future or our children’s future or lately our grandchildren’s future to save the world or destroy our enemies or cure some “original sin.” It occurs to me that this is not an accident. This is the means of controlling us and keeping us from prospering.
If Donald Trump and his successors want to save this country their assignment should be to restore this country to normalcy. They need to allow us to get our feet back underneath us again and get back a sense of balance. End all of the emergencies. Give us some peace and quiet and allow us to live like Americans again instead of like serfs.
Fans of the “Lord of the Rings” know that the Shire is the most boring place imaginable. All of the adventure and excitement happens in places like Rohan and Gondor that are full of battles against the agent of evil; orcs, trolls, evil men and the like. But it’s also true that the greatest sense of loss for the hobbits is when they return home to the Shire only to find that these enemies have spoiled the boring peace and quiet of the Shire and replaced it with fear and danger. Because what you discover is that safe, boring, prosperous, well-ordered communities are the only place where healthy people can exist. Because they’re the only place where you can raise a family and earn a living and leave something behind for next generation.
And the only way to make that happen is to end the chaos. End the protests and the grievances. End the rancor. People in the 1960s were always making fun of the 1950s. They said it was boring and repressed compared to the sexual revolution and the revolution in the streets that came a decade after. They mocked the bland image of Dwight Eisenhower as the father of the country overseeing a boring but prosperous nation chasing after and realizing the American Dream.
Well, that sounds just about like heaven to me right now. Donald Trump and anyone who wants to follow him should be selling us on the idea that Washington should be moving heaven and earth to stop the chaos and give Americans a chance to be boring and happy. They should arrange for the people in this country to have a generation when the priority is to earn a living, raise a family and maybe watch a baseball game on a Saturday afternoon without thinking about war, crime, or civil unrest. The pursuit of happiness.
That should be the plan.
I remember crouching in the halls of an elementary school practicing for a nuclear attack so it wasn’t all pastoral.
But still I understand and wholeheartedly agree with your point. Boring is wholly underestimated and just beats the devil out of crisis after crisis.
“Boring is wholly underestimated and just beats the devil out of crisis after crisis.” Exactly. And those of us who went to college might not understand what the last fifty years have done to the working class. It has practically exterminated them. Go to western New York state and see that it’s been emptied of its original inhabitants.
I remember Duck And Cover drills. Later on in high school I was a civil defense (remember that?) warden and in charge of the radiological detection equipment for the school shelter. Both junior and senior years. We had Geiger counters, pen dosimeters, all sorts of stuff. Other students and teachers were in charge of maintaining differing emergency supplies. My girlfriend at the time was studying nursing and she was in charge of medical supplies. We theoretically had enough supplies for the entire student body and faculty to last 2 weeks. I felt sorry for the two guys in charge of… Read more »
“I felt sorry for the two guys in charge of sanitation.”
Heh! Just tell them they are in training for a lifetime of highly paid employment as Sanitation Engineers.
My one dalliance with environmental engineering was when I was part of a team doing a sizing study on the waste treatment plant for the Borden’s Clams plant in Cape May NJ. All I can say is I have never eaten another clam after having to manually taken a sample from the main waste tank. Oh boy.
The scouring of the shire could not be added when the movie was made. They claim it was because of time constraints, but I’m betting it gave the wrong message. If the people understood they actually have the power to force change, the people who have hoarded the power and instituted crisis after crisis would have to face their mortality and morality being judged by their actual masters not the causes they sold what passes for their souls to.
My hope is that some of the other Republicans will learn something from Trump’s example. If not then severe measures may be necessary.