In the novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes, “They were careless people–Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Of late it feels as though very wealthy Americans who have no concept of what it is like to be ordinary are behaving like Tom and Daisy. The combined income of Trump’s cabinet is estimated to be well over twenty billion dollars. Not a one of them lives a middle class lifestyle. They jet around with their designer clothes and watches, staying in the finest hotels and eating the finest food. They lost touch long ago with being just one of the unknown and unheard faces in the world and yet they act as though they know exactly what we all need to enjoy better lives. Unfortunately their ideas are doing little more that tearing our agencies and our laws apart. Their smashing of things is making our existence all the more difficult.
I have read every page of Project 2025 and it outlines much of what these rich folks are doing in the name of giving our democracy a major redux. Their idea of saving money is to take away much of ours while enriching themselves at every turn. They think of themselves as being brighter than most of us and their biggest hope is that we won’t take notice of what they are doing until it is way too late to clean up the horrendous messes they have made.
I’ve been watching them in a state of anxiety as I see them hacking at our educational foundations, our public schools and our world class universities. They act as though they know everything there is to understand about how to run such complex organizations but they are way out of their element. A school or university is not just a business whose goal is to garner money. The investment in education leads to a citizenry capable of running and improving virtually every aspect of American life. The investments in education reap far more important gains in the end than just slashing budgets without much thought as to the unintended consequences of doing so.
As a matter of fact a large number of unintended consequences are beginning to emerge from so many aspect of our government. Right now our once stunning health and medical organizations are reeling under the guidance of a man who is untrained in either medicine or science who does not believe in germ theory. He is peddling hoaxes and untested theories as though they are true and firing reputable experts who dare to question his ideas. it would be as though I suddenly landed a job as a college football coach just because I’ve watched a lot of games and read articles about how to pull a team together.
Then there is the travesty of our immigration system which is now represented by barely trained masked members of ICE who seem to be picking up anyone who appears to be remotely suspicious. They show up decked out in camo with little or no identification bearing guns that should only be given to soldiers engaged in actual war. Their great leader has so many costumes that she will surely inspire many looks for Halloween.
Our military is being run by a television personality who seems to think that dressing like Uncle Sam makes him more patriotic. He wants to call the Defense Department the Department of War even in supposed times of peace. It blows me away that members of the military are not protesting loudly and clearly for surely he is making our nation less safe than it once was.
Those tariffs that we are urged to love are already raising the prices of everything. My husband looked at a jacket that was one hundred dollars earlier this summer that is now one hundred twenty five dollars. Because it was made in South Korea I suspect that the price might rise even higher once the official tariffs kick in. For some reason fools seem to think that this is good for our nation but already India has decided to shift its commercial efforts from the United States to China and Russia.
Speaking of Russia, Trump’s kowtowing of Putin has not gotten him anywhere. It feels as though Putin is just gleefully giving us the finger even as we roll out the red carpet for him. If someone had told me back in the sixties during the Cuban Missile Crisis that one day our president would be attempting to cozy up to a Russian dictator I would not have believed it. Actually I would not have believed that the son of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. would be such an embarrassment to his family either.
I loved reading The Great Gatsby with its symbols, metaphors and allusions to the struggles between the very wealthy and the rest of us. Never did I think that our nation would fall for fakers whose only goal in life is to accumulate more and more power but now such people seem to be in charge of everything. I hope our destiny is not to end up like Jay Gatsby. Surely we won’t let these clueless folks continue to corrupt our American Dreams. It’s time we see and deal with the moral decay.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 