Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Blunt Force Trauma on the Global Body Politic

When a group of physicians initially diagnose a victim of a non-penetrating trauma attack, they are not looking at forecasting the inevitable scars that will appear on the outward appearance of the victim - the sizable welts and contusions that form on those parts of the body that has most absorbed the impact of the attack, even though they do offer clues as to its severity. They are, instead, frantically looking at whether any of the major organs have been debilitated as a result of the attack - specifically, the areas such as the bowel, spleen, liver, and/or intestines, and whether the damage requires immediate surgical intervention to stabilize the victim.

The damage being done today on the common perception of the roles; politics, government, and leadership plays in each of our lives is not being given a similar consideration, as we read long-form dystopian visions of a future where plastic-maned madmen running all-powerful governments threaten allies with dismemberment from critical alliances because of the colour of their skins or the tones of their voices. Most of us are of the understanding that representative democracy is most often reflective of a compromise between impossible choices modern societies face - another large-scale real-estate development, for example, being sanctioned in a world increasingly unable to cope with our occupancy of it, in the hope that we will have eventually evolved enough to see ourselves as part of a sustainable and self-sustaining ecosystem, not as its ham-handed destroyers. But when the facade falls away, when the particularly loathsome manifestation of individual greed is revealed for all the world to see, when we are stunned in response to the sight, when we reflect on the history of civilization and all that we've been through as a culture to get to this period, when a man clearly in need of a clinical psychiatrist is being considered as the potential leader of the free world, what is it that restricts what needs to be said and done? Every nation on earth, whatever its history, will recognize in the person of Donald Trump a familiar figure in their own politics: a power-hungry, obnoxious, facile, and ultimately destructive figurehead of a system gone, quite horribly, wrong. Every nation on earth is framing laws, putting strictures on, and restricting the opportunities for; the elevation of such figures to their highest offices. Sometimes the battles are long and hard and are momentarily lost, but the war has never ended, anywhere. If there is one unifying factor among all of the world's dogged everyday battlers it is the contempt for the values that Donald Trump professes - a proselytizing zeal for xenophobia, and a proud malice that targets those less fortunate than oneself.
And here we are making fun of his hair, and his foreign-policy gaffes, and his outstanding ignorance of the issues that matter to the 99% of the population (of the world) that he stands markedly outside of, due to the fortunate circumstance of having being born into wealth. Why are we not seeing that continuing to treat his campaign as a legitimate expression of democracy is hurting us from the inside out, tearing apart those vital organs of society that have been, with a lot of effort, keeping us from tearing each other to pieces in the streets?

An unequal world needs the sceptre of genuine aspiration to continue being. We cannot succumb to fantasies that fly in the face of all we know and have gained through painful and excruciating experience of war, famine, disease through many generations that lived through their troubled times hoping against hope for a better world.

We need to shut Trump down, just as we need to shut down Modi, Cameron, the assorted tyrants in the Middle-East, and other silk-tongued-and-robed purveyors of hate in the rest of the world.
In a world abundantly capable of total and absolute self-destruction, at the expense of all the other things we could have been totally and absolutely capable of and are not, can we afford to be complacent?