Trump's Failures Are Erasing the Memory of American Greatness
It seems easier every day to wonder if America has lost its memory. And it seems even easier to believe that what many of us thought and felt about our country 42 months ago is different today as we sit in July of an election year.
Growing up, a lot of us took it for granted that we lived in the greatest country on Earth. It was an automatic—didn’t the Greatest Generation survive the Great Depression, defeat Japan and Hitler’s Germany, and leave Europe without claiming any territory? We came home, implemented the Marshall Plan, rebuilt whole nations, passed the G.I. Bill, signed a national highway act that opened up the country, helped create suburbs, defeated polio, matched Sputnik, went to the moon, applauded Elvis, said hello to The Beatles and good-bye to JFK, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy while so many had so much dignity stolen from them in places like Birmingham, Alabama, Mississippi, and Massachusetts, and as too many lives and part of our soul disappeared in Vietnam.
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We were and are an imperfect nation, an imperfect people, living in this huge, sprawling, multi-colored, open, free land called America. No matter the built-in defects placed in our story by our own hand and our own history it’s remained a land of opportunity, one that’s always in the process of re-working, re-making, re-defining itself hopefully for the better. And no matter what tragedy or inequity occurred, no matter how shocking, terrible or unfair it was, the sun kept coming up in the morning, optimism always emerged from the shade, the darkness and the embers.
Until now.
Until our memory of who we really are, what we have done and what we have meant in the world around us—the good, the bad, all of it—and who we really want to be was lost, crushed by a man who looks at a global epidemic, more than three and a half million infections, well over 100,000 deaths, millions more unemployed with rents and mortgages due, with furlough being a simple word for no future job like the one you just lost, looks at all that and feels sorry only for himself.
He talks, rambles actually, about grievance not governance. His whole life has been a litany of lies. He is always the victim and is so blinded by the swollen size of his ego that he can not see and does not recognize the casualties left behind behind: America, the presidency itself, the nation’s citizens who at a minimum expected protection, defense and a calming, competent hand against enemies medical and military seeking to harm our democracy.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-failures-erasing-memory-american-091802006.html
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