For many years, I've been asking Trump voters what event it would take for them to wake up and disavow their fearless leader. The answer is usually crickets. So you’ll understand why I was struck by this recent quote in The Atlantic, "... it became clear to me that the old man had nothing to lose. He is a psychopath and does not care what happens to us all, to our economy, to our future."
Of course, this quote is not about Trump, exactly. Here's the entire quote: "On February 24, when the invasion of Ukraine began, it became clear to me that the old man had nothing to lose. He is a psychopath and does not care what happens to us all, to our economy, to our future." Obviously, but stay with me for a second.
This is going someplace interesting because the soviet programmer being interviewed went further. He added that his country has become nothing more than, "A few old men and an army of zombies . . . leading us to hell. I say that because people around me in Russia behaved as if they had been bitten by a zombie, dragging my entire country into a dreadful war. All I saw was Russian loser husbands beating their wives, while the entire rotting house of the state system has turned my people into an army of the dead."
Is this the future of America under the GOP? Toxic masculinity run amok? Abortion bans helping trap women in broken marriages and damaging relationships via unwanted pregnancies? A purposeful rape and wrecking of a government that, although not perfect, does a pretty good job of protecting and assisting us in ways we're not always even aware of?
It's not like the GOP is not telling us what they're going to do? As for their supporters who, zombi-like, think they won't eventually be coming for them after they can't come for everyone else, well, lets just say, "Udachi."
Funny thing is, these days the same questioning is beginning to surface in the Iranian theocracy, where people are finally, finally, waking up country wide after one death too many--the killing of a woman for a religious "crime." And, at last, the men are standing with the women to say, enough already.
It is so strange. Populations in the world who we long viewed as our enemies are moving towards an understanding of the value of democracy and the sleepwalking death entailed in autocracy. Yet many in the U.S, our supposed greatest patriots, are moving in the opposite direction. Very strange, indeed.