High winds are blowing across America, and they are fanning fires from coast to coast. These fires are destroying the lives and property of people from California to Maine and making the future bleak for rich and poor alike. Property insurance rates are sky-high, and some places (Miami Beach?) may soon become simply unlivable.
This year is set to be declared the hottest in human history since such record keeping began. While this declaration refers to temperature changes and their accompanying disasters, the changes in our cultural and political climate are no less inflammatory.
Political pundits are already eagerly discussing the changes in our political and cultural patterns. Those on the left of the spectrum are both stunned and dismayed by the willingness of so many Americans to vote for a person of such debased moral character as Donald Trump.
One Facebook user suggested that many Trump voters traded their soul for lower egg prices. Another former neighbor of mine, now living in Indiana, put his house up for sale, telling us that, since he couldn’t afford to go to Canada, he was moving to Illinois, a blue state, to be safe.
Trump voters are elated at the extent of his victory, and some celebrate this in joyful nastiness. My final Democratic column on Nov 8 elicited this anonymous email in which I was called a woke liar and then added: “tell the doc that you have Trump derangement syndrome. He’ll know what meds the snowflakes are taking these days for their self-induced psychosis. At the end of your stint, you were worse than that last guy Ward. I just thought he was a crazy bastard, but you certainly outdone him there at the end. Good luck in your recovery and remember... M A G A !!”
I do, however, have Republican friends who did not vote for Trump, recognizing the dangerous changes that the new administration will soon be making to our government, and the great pain this will bring to many of our citizens as the members of the Project 2025 gang begin to reduce many services and new tariffs trigger more inflation instead of lower egg prices.
What is most interesting about these two existential (yes, I still use this word) crises we face is that so far there is less outcry than I would have expected in the commercial press about the environmental or the cultural-political changes to come.
This is understandable as Democrats are processing this major defeat and those who elected Trump have not yet understood that his election was about much more than inflation and the border.
The MAGA plan is to change America dramatically—its culture and its political system. Time will make that clear.
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