Will Greed Trump Our National Values?

How far can greed take you?

Are you willing to give up truth?

Are you willing to give up compassion and aid to the needy and infirm?

Are you willing to stoke bigotry?

Are you willing to weaken the foundations of government?

Are you willing to disengage from international protocols?

Are you willing to abandon decency?

Are you willing to forego civic and social values?

Are you willing to live with fewer environmental protections, with fewer consumer financial protections, with fewer worker protections, with fewer food and drug safety protections, with fewer civil rights for all?

Are you willing to live with brinksmanship rather than diplomacy?

Are you willing to discard the promise of the Statue of Liberty, willing to extinguish its beacon of opportunity extended to all who yearn “to breathe free”?

These are all relevant questions in the Age of Trump.

Lest we forget, Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992 set the template with its sharply pronounced slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Under Trump the stock market keeps going in the direction set by Barack Obama—up.  Consumer confidence has skyrocketed. Unemployment remains low. Productivity is above 3% two quarters in a row. 

People, especially the rich, are feeling flush. You might say even greedy. They want “more.” 

But at what cost to our national id? 

Can more value in our asset bank trump our national values? Can more money make us proud to be Americans at the risk of losing what it has meant to be an American? 

I surely hope not.

Donald Trump Is The Reason I Am Sleep Deprived

For some years now I have woken up several times in the middle of the night. I’m a man approaching his late sixties so there’s nothing unusual about that (for the unaware, it’s a prostate thing). No matter. With rare exception I have always been able to easily slip back to sleep.

Until recently. Until Donald Trump. Donald Trump is robbing me of a good night’s sleep. Even as he jets home each night to sleep in his own bed atop Trump Tower I lay awake in the middle of the night too hepped up by the prospect of his becoming president to drift off into more rem cycles. This blogpost, for example, was written at 5:20 am after I already failed over the prior 60 minutes to fall back to sleep.

This is no joke. It is not funny. As my wife slumbers on next to me I lay awake wondering how any rational human being can seriously vote for such an ill-prepared candidate to be president of the United States. Has our electorate really become so gullible, so naive, so uninformed, so disillusioned, so angry that they dismiss his appeal to bigotry, racism, xenophobia, misogyny that they don’t see his divisiveness, his arrogance, his inability to tell the truth, his attacks on opponents for the very actions he perpetrates? Do they—and for the sake of the country, if not the world, I hope they don’t—share his worse traits?

Okay, I get it. Hillary Clinton is not an ideal alternative. But she has devoted almost her entire adult life to public service while Trump has devoted his to self-enrichment often at the expense of people he has bilked out of deserved compensation or personal savings.

I can’t fall back to sleep. How many others are similarly afflicted? Is Donald Trump turning half the country into a nation of sleep-deprived zombies? I once read resting is just as recuperative as sleeping. No way!

It’s 5:57. Almost time for the alarm to wake me up. But I’m not asleep.

I’m not sure I can take another seven weeks of this, much less four or, heaven forbid, eight years.

Donald Trump is the reason I am sleep deprived.