What Trump is doing is “enough to break your brain,” laments M. Gessen in the New York Times. It’s breaking my brain, too. For example, Trump is supporting Netanyahu’s genocidal actions in Gaza and is selling out Ukraine to Putin.
Add to that, Trump’s glaring contradictions: His extralegal killing of over 80 Venezuelans in small boats, whom he accuses of drug running without proof, while, at the same time, pardoning the former president of Honduras, convicted of smuggling tons of cocaine into our country. And that’s no exception: today, as I write this, Trump is pardoning another criminal, Congressman Henry Cuellar, charged with accepting $600,000 in bribes.
But yet, there are still bigger issues than his duplicity and corruption. Trump is doubling down on fossil fuels while calling human-caused climate change a hoax. He is kidnapping and deporting immigrants, without due process, snatched off our streets by masked, Gestapo-like ICE agents.
And that’s just a sample of what’s breaking my brain, which, according to Gessen, is the number one goal of dictators: “Autocrats aim to scramble reality, plunging the citizenry into a permanent state of anxious confusion.”
While they make a good point, I’m afraid our brokenness precedes Trump. We’ve become too fat and lazy, too self-possessed to give a damn. This is the mirror image of how America used to be.
This contrast between our past selves and who we are now was recently etched into my brain from watching Ken Burns’ 12-hour epic, “The American Revolution,” about how we came to be. Back then, we were magnificent: a scraggly group of newly arrived immigrants — who, against all odds, defeated the most powerful nation on Earth.
The fight was indescribably harrowing, taking over eight devastating years of blockades and sieges, attacks by unrelenting volleys of musket fire and bayonet charges by regiments of British Redcoats, all while being bombarded by the world’s most powerful Navy. We usually lost the individual battles, but never gave up, until in 1781 we outlasted the British, who surrendered at Yorktown.
We had to stick together back then out of necessity because, as Benjamin Franklin warned his fellow compatriots, “we must all hang together, or we will all hang separately.” Who can doubt we’ve lost that collective spirit today, a sense of community that we are all in it together.
Like all recently arrived immigrants thrust into a strange, new land, life was perilous. Looking after only yourself and your family, as libertarians preach today, was a death sentence. Building a community was paramount, and instituting public schools was a top priority.
Our founders understood that for democracy to thrive, we needed an educated populace. Here in New Hampshire, we adopted community schools early, even before we were a country: Our first public school, The Centre School in Hampton, opened in 1649 and was funded by taxation.
While the early colonists prized liberty, their first obligation was to their community, which was essential to their survival and well-being. Thus, every town held communal events to raise barns, harvest crops, maintain roads and whatever else was beyond the capacity of individual families. In addition, each town had a town common: a central, publicly accessible open space for livestock pasturing and public events.
When I studied sociology, I learned that all societies privilege a social self with specific responsibilities to offset the limitless desires of the private ego. Sadly, over my lifetime, I’ve watched America’s social self progressively wither, replaced by an ever more demanding private self, fueled by unbridled consumerism.
This privatization has gone so far that many of us no longer recognize our social responsibilities. This has led to pathologies, according to sociologist Thomas Edsall, that “undermine solidarity as the glue of social life.”
That’s why our New Hampshire roads, public education and public amenities are going to hell, why Congress has passed almost nothing except for their “Big, Beautiful, Bill,” gifting tax breaks to the rich and why we haven’t taken steps to combat the coming climate catastrophe that Trump calls a hoax.
I’ll grant Donald Trump one thing: The source of our problem is not him, but the privatization of our social selves. If privatization is a Mack truck, Trump is only the gold hood ornament.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.