Just The Facts, Please

Since the 2016 election, I’ve been carrying a sense of unease. How could it happen that so many voted for a man who bragged about watching teen beauty contestants undress?

Four years later, the worry backed off when Biden took office, but the lecher’s minions were still around. And here we are in 2024, learning how Trump bends all the rules and watching some members of the Supreme Court question if maybe that’s OK.

Is this fear gnawing at my stomach how people felt in the runup to the Civil War? Is this the feeling as Hitler rolled over Czechoslovakia and into Poland?

As disconcerted as I and some of my friends feel, I’m astonished at how many people think things are going OK so long as we can get rid of the old guy and cut some more taxes. From where comes this disconnect from reality?

Let’s start with the Closed Border Christians. You do know that Jesus asked us to welcome the stranger and feed the hungry, don’t you? Oh, and he was most definitely not of European descent.

Remember when a candidate for president was forced to drop out of the race when reporters leaked an affair. Bill Clinton was impeached because he lied about sex with an intern. And here we are, people campaigning and voting for a man who was convicted of grabbing E. Jean Carroll, like he said he could, on the Access Hollywood tape, because he was rich and famous.

The same man who cries “Fake News!” when someone reports on him based a presidential campaign on fake news. Are any of his voters following Pecker’s testimony in the campaign finance violations trial?

The party who wants to impeach Biden without evidence of wrongdoing covered their eyes when the children of the former president set up shop in the White House and made a killing off their dad’s presidency. What’s that I hear from the GOP? Yep, crickets.

How can people believe that a cruel, self-centered man is the right choice to lead this country? Yet, an acquaintance told me that she just felt safer under Donald Trump.

It didn’t do any good to ask her who set up the deal with the Taliban that doomed Afghanistan. Who pulled us out of the deal that enabled monitoring of Iran’s nuclear ambitions? How’s that going?

I can’t quite pin down how this country has gone so awry, but I think we must give some blame to “alternative facts.” Social media has opened so-called news venues that allow people with an agenda to make up their own stories. And people who want to believe, for whatever reasons, pick the source that tells them what they want to hear.

When the news is tainted, and when lies become truth in someone’s head, can upheaval be far behind?

What can we do to set things straight? I’m asking for 81,000,000 friends.