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.