The World Turned Upside Down

Here There Be Dragons

There is a story—mostly likely apocryphal—that when the British surrendered at Yorktown, the British army band played “The World Turned Upside Down.” Apocryphal or not, that moment in time did signal a major shift in the then-global political fortunes of our two nations. What happened in 2016 brought to the world stage someone, and some…thing…more disruptive than anything my generation has ever experienced. The world has turned upside down.

We now have a president who casts the ship of state away from the welcoming piers of our allies, and sets a course for the deceitful and unsafe harbors of our enemies. The waters we are now sailing through have been well-marked in the past, with warnings on every previous president's charts that beyond the known routes of safe travel there is terra incognita...and dragons. Yet, toward these inhospitable lands this president is sailing, joyous in his ignorance, ordering up a full head of steam in order to reach the deadly shoals of the Pacific Rim with ever-increasing speed.

We now have members of the cabinet and other men and women who hold high elected or appointed office who resort to Biblical quotations--often out of context--to justify the abomination of child-parent separation at our Southern border. We have cabinet officials for whom the normal rules of the game no longer apply and who flaunt, regularly, their sense of empowerment and entitlement. And the one man who could right such wrongs is no less an empowerment and entitlement animal who thinks nothing of abusing the privilege accorded him by his base of misled voters.

Like the characters in Plato's cave--a 3rd-century BC allegory featured in "The Republic"--we are chained to one wall of a cave and forced to watch shadows of Trump's administration move across the blank wall in front of us. Through Socrates, Plato says the shadows are the uninformed realities of those who are chained; In the 21st century, I say the shadows we see now are the rational fears of those who are chained.

Quite frankly, this administration scares me more with each passing day, and I don’t get it. I don’t understand why or how an entire majority of Congress is cowed into irresponsibility and moral failure; I don’t understand why, after 500+ days of the president’s term, the outrage is not more palpable, counter-reactive, and effective; I don’t understand how a broad swath of Americans is not outraged by the president’s saluting to a North Korean general, or how a substantial number of the electorate accepts like quiet mice the vicious insults to a man like John McCain and to the rule of law and to common decency when it comes to immigrant families. I don’t get it. Just don’t.

And my list of “don’t get-its” gets longer every day. I don’t get lies. I don’t get them when they roll dementedly off the lips of a barely literate leader, and I don’t get them when they are repeated as truth by so many others in and out of the White House. I don’t get how any Oval Office occupant can get away with demeaning the news media with the clear intent of tearing down public trust in what is probably our last remaining bastion of truth-to-power advocacy.

There are too many more “I don’t get-its” for me to post here, and I know many of you could add to the list. I understand the frustrations felt by many Americans who fear disenfranchisement from the original dream; I know too many citizens are vulnerable to snake-oil salesmen who promise much and will deliver nothing but more pain; I even believe many voters had totally legitimate reasons for voting the way they did…I also believe in buyer’s remorse and wish there was more of it now.

But…and here is the hard part for me…I have no voice in this anymore. When I was posting in Huffington, or even when I post here in my blog or on Quora, I thought I was able, as a journalist, to reach beyond my own keyboard to shine some additional light down the dark alleys of legerdemain and outright deceit. But the truth is, while I believe in confronting darkness with my own light, I also am a practical man who sees the futility of speaking out with no credentials, legitimate forum, or reasonable hope of reaching beyond the circle of friends who are already believers.

The depth of my sadness at this reality is more than profound…it is emotionally crippling.

What has happened, along with the world turning upside down, is a polarization of that world…a bifurcation of ideologies tearing our nation apart. I cannot speak to any issue and expect a reasonable, logical, well-crafted, open-to-debate response from the other side. I cannot reach across the aisle with a genuine desire to share a middle ground…the aisle is now an abyss, and the middle ground has been scorched with invective and ad hominem attacks not just against writers like me who know what’s coming, but against anyone who questions the motives, means, and methods of our current administration.

And in the end I’m just an everyman, a one-time reporter and editor whose time has passed. Like many people of my generation, I’m old and getting older, unheard, and forgotten. The country I loved is not the country I’m living in right now; the world I knew—and I’m not talking about some halcyon “Leave it to Beaver” world…I don’t want to go back in time, not at all—is a world that is now sheltering in place, frightened, paralyzed, hyperventilating in a closet of unknowing.

I leave you with this: There is a monster walking down the halls our country. He is knocking on the doors behind which we huddle. We can hear his gun butt splintering our protection. He is turning off the lights of justice, dousing us in the darkness of deceit while he struts with his gang of thugs on a mission to terrorize and subdue a nation that seems incapable of wresting from him his ill-gotten gains. He is laughing at us. He is demented.