Sosbee.com

Occasionally, you hear people talk about a president’s “legacy”, meaning “what did he leave us?” It is too soon to speculate who will write Trump’s legacy, but you can be sure people are taking notes. In the meantime, we are forced to live with Trump while he is creating his legacy, and judging from the people with whom he has surrounded himself, it will probably be one of callous regression. So while the Donald is doing his thing, let us not forget that it was the GOP, the Republican Party, that put him in the White House for the sole purpose of grabbing control of the government, not because they had any delusions that this particular con man would make a decent President of the United States, not at all. Gaining control of government will be the GOP legacy, and that one is not yet written.

The Trumpocalypse covered in your September 11/18, 2017, issue was actually the second one visited upon America in my lifetime. The first was the one Ronald Reagan delivered in 1980. His Four Horsemen were: Privatizer, Tax Cutter, Deficit Hawk, and Regressor.

We seem to be looking at a total potential damage of hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the hundreds of billions of dollars. That’s billions with a “B”! (Some say it might pass a trillion.) How in the world are we going to pay for it? Do any of the victims have insurance coverage or savings accounts large enough to cover this kind of damage? Probably not. But… If you added up all the cash squirreled away by every citizen of the USA, how much would it aggregate? Would it be asking too much for everyone (we are talking about every citizen of the USA)). To share a small percentage of their savings with those who have lost everything, including the cities and towns that suffered infrastructure destruction? Would the top 10% of Americans (in terms of accumulated wealth) feel the pinch if they were assessed a small percentage ( say five percent)of their net worth? An even smaller assessment (say one percent) could be applied to those with smaller net worth, (the appraised value of the homestead, of course, would not be included in calculating net worth). This is a terrible idea. That is obvious. It is not everyone’s fault that houses and cities, factories and roads were built willy-nilly in flood-prone areas. But it is right and proper that we start monetizing our climate- change denial and its overall effect on the severity of weather events such as these killer storms.

Donald Trump had a chance, an opportunity, to do something really good for a large number of very deserving young people. He could have reaffirmed the DACA program, but he did the opposite. He blew it.

By now, everyone except the solid 35% realizes there is no one at the wheel of the ship of state we call the USA. The Donald is campaigning for the election of 2020. Congress is in siesta mode trying to anticipate what’s coming next out of the Trump mouth, and everyone is sort of waiting for various shoes to drop. But this is a Republican problem. They brought him into the White House and they have grabbed majority control over everything. All we can do is hope no dire international crisis pops up while Donald Trump has possession of the nuclear codes.

You could write a book to describe all the ways people disagree with each other. But, in effect, they pretty much boiled down to one thing: partisan politics. For the life of me, I cannot understand why Republicans think the way they do, why they are not aghast at the shameful inequality of wealth and income that exists and continues to grow in America. And why problems we thought had been solved in the 60s and 70s are still with us today, as intractable as ever. How did the politics of division come to permeate all levels of government? Will we ever achieve that level of maturity where people can regard other people as equal for the reason that they, too, are human beings, whether or not they look like us? For starters, can we quit demeaning, insulting, and otherwise disrespecting those who think differently, and replace the negativity with positive proposals? Can we follow the builders and reject the wreckers without regard to their political label?

The only way America would ever elect a bigot as president would be if the bigotry were well concealed, below the surface, camouflaged by codewords, and inside jokes. Most Republicans knew very well Trump’s ideological makeup but chose to ignore its implications. They were blinded by the potential glory of total control of government if they could bring Trump’s know-nothing crowds into the GOP’s “big tent”. Okay. They have control now, and they also have both Trump and his skinhead minions. How will they handle the fallout?

Now that Steve Bannon is out, another big shoe is waiting to drop, namely: Will the GOP maintain its embrace of the alt- right voting bloc that put Donald Trump in the White House, or will they publicly denounce and distance the party from white nationalism and all of its progeny? It was that very sizable bloc that gave Republicans the majority in many elections. With it, they will remain dominant for the foreseeable future. Without it, the playing field should be more level.

“If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.” That was a quote from the mother of Heather Heyer, the young woman killed in the Charlottesville riot. It could as well have been applied to any number of events of the past 150 years, but it took an impromptu performance by Donald Trump, in which he declared his support for advocates of white supremacy, to bring it front and center once again. Now we have a new universal watchword: “Pay attention to what’s going on, and let your outrage be known”.

As senior citizen, I am covered by Medicare, and as a veteran of World War II I am covered by the Veterans Administration Healthcare System. The VA system is great, but Medicare is better. It is a single payer system where the health care providers remain independent of the government, but the government simply pays most of the medical bills, and you can use any doctor or hospital you choose that takes Medicare. There is a lot of misinformation floating around about single-payer, all of it wrong. For instance, every one of these statements about single-payer is untrue:
*It is run by the government *It will lead to rationing *Costs will skyrocket *Drugs will be harder to get *It will cover less than what I have now *It will cost me more
So if you ever have a discussion, or need to cast a ballot on the subject, and someone throws out any of these negatives against single-payer, you will know better.