Thinking:  from Pearl Harbor to Standing Rock to Donald Trump – OpEdNews.com Headlined 12/6/16

Posted on December 6, 2016 Updated on December 6, 2016

At least since Presidents John Adams and Jefferson, politicians and businesses have lied us into wars, both foreign and domestic – but, slicing through reality with an AR-15-style assault rifle, brandished by a twenty-eight-year-old on a self-investigate mission aided and abetted by a President-Elect’s Social Media Tweeting supporter and his generally pedophilia obsessed father – What could possibly go wrong?

Seventy-five years ago, Europe not our problem Americans were bombed into a super power, home of the brave armored in self-appointed responsibility — the greatest generation — a global defense to protect the world from all who would dominate it, except, we ourselves.

Seventy-five years later, conservatives, holding the truth of their intentions close to their chests, retrograded America to The Right side of isolationism.

Consumed by the desire for simplicity:  simple solutions to compounded personal interests, manipulated by a Military Industrial Complex misdirecting us with, Government is the Problem, we gasp for truth, mistaking affirmation for information — nearly drowning in post Bush/Cheney/Wall Street tea stained Recession – thinking, fails to kick in to stop a Koch/ALEC/GOP/Chris Jankowski Red Mapped trumped land.

Nonetheless, hope is just a Trump overreach away; unity, at the end of a shortsighted Republican tunnel and even, perhaps, 2020 civility, on the horizon – as soon as we start rethinking our own thoughts about how we think for, and beyond ourselves.

This is our opportunity to reignite collective reasoning to eliminate the fake news we’ve ingested, and with gratitude, embrace the chance to redefine ourselves progressive and thoughtful enough, to welcome back those feeling forgotten — when the realization they’ve been used by the very establishment on which they depend and abhor — reveals its maniacal dismissal of our shared economic and healthcare concerns.

Donald Trump is hardly the first misogynistic bigot we’ve elected to the presidency.  Though he may be the first to openly Tweet Islamophobia as a national policy, he’s certainly not the first potential 1600 groping inhabitant to be gay about being openly homophobic.  Nor is he alone in presidential inner circles of crude – and though grossly internationally inept – attention must be paid to the increase in clueless governors and members of Congress on the take.

As History, has proven, finding, or creating, an enemy to identify as the cause of all our problems, is an easy, but essential tool for the powerful to pizzagate the populous populists, into believing in their powerlessness, so they fall in line, following the loudest trumpeter of disharmony.

To the Party that long ago replaced its allegiance to Lincoln with affirmations of intolerance and inciting extremism with misinformation, I offer reason:  it’s not only bigotry and hypocrisy that drive the underbelly of humanity’s faceless and infamous antagonists casting long shadows over human progress — It’s the lies we tell ourselves:

• Our success and prosperity require others to live in poverty
• People of color are destroying our white culture
• Earning a degree equates to being Liberal Elitists
• Wall Street Hedge Fund, Oil & Gas Pipeline and banking CEO’s who caused international economic collapse and our Great Recession care about Americans wearing any collar color

Think about it:

• Our inner-cities are not inhabited by only poor people of color
• The burden of Student Loan and Credit Card Debt is color blind and impacts our international reputation, sense of national self and confidence levels of all American tints and hues
• Unlike Flint, Government and People Power have spared the Dakota Sioux tribe and its clean water

America is neither sit-com nor reality show, so, while it’s arguably true that Trump embarrasses us all, the difference is, those who either voted for him, or not at all, gave him permission.

We need to start thinking about how we’ve been marketed to think, because in a global role where the world has taken us seriously, the highest office in the land, must be rational enough, to be taken literally.