Happiness is right around the corner
Terrible people are helping Trump paint a dark picture of America. Ignore them and stay focused.
Do you remember how it felt in those days immediately after Joe Biden declined the nomination and Kamala Harris stepped up? The outbreak of joy that swept the country?
Where did all that happiness go? Donald Trump, the nation’s killjoy, got rid of it. He tells us every day that we live in a world where people eat their neighbors’ dogs, and enemies lurk within. He says we are overrun by foreign gangs, and the nation’s economy is in ruins. He even managed to make a hurricane worse, by telling people that the folks who are coming to help are, instead, folks coming to steal what’s left.
Who needs this ugliness? Who wants it?
The answer should be no one. But that’s not quite true. Some very powerful forces in America are happy to see misery spread across the land. Because if we are scared and angry and feel helpless enough, we might turn to a guy like Donald Trump. Then they get more tax cuts, their companies get to act without oversight, women get put back in their kitchens, foreigners will be so threatened by deportation that they will work in terrible condition in their sweatshops, and their version of faith will become government enforced orthodoxy.
These terrible people have names: Bill Ackman. Timothy Mellon. Isaac and Laura Perlmutter. Linda McMahon. Robert Bigelow. Patricia Duggan. Elon Musk. Miriam Adelson. Roberta Combs. Marc Andreessen. Dick and Liz Uihlein. Donald Trump has promised them that they will have never have to vote again after he wins.
I’ll give them credit for coming closer than I thought they could. But powerful and rich as they are, they do not yet rule over us yet. I am confident they never will.
I expect Americans to believe our own eyes rather than the terrible things these terrible people want us to believe. Look at any residential street just after work and before dinner. You will see dogs. But they aren’t being stolen for food, neighbors are just out walking them. Go to a community meeting and you will see the guy living next door. He’s not an enemy. Like you, he just wants to voice his concerns for the future. Walking the dog or at that community meeting, you won’t see foreign gangs because they aren’t there. And our terribly economy? It’s the strongest in the world.
Photo Credit: Dustin Franz/AFP
There is something in our character that expels negativity like a healthy body expels a virus. Americans are optimistic, strong, forward-looking, and hard working. We don’t whine. We get things done. And, mostly, we understand the obligations that come with the freedom we love.
There are pundits who confuse the anxieties of a political campaign with the darkness that these terrible people want us to feel. They are wrong. That anxiety is just the normal by product of hard work and a looming deadline.
All that happiness and hope will come roaring back when we finish the job and deliver a crushing defeat to Mr. Trump and his gang.