(Good morning, it is now midnight. It is important to remember that journalism was created  not by wealthy corporations, but in the idealistic and beautifully written pamphlets of farmers and fierce individuals like Thomas Paine, who was a corset-maker by trade. I can’t really compare myself to him, but I am happy to be writing my own pamphlets, soaring above the moaning of the left and the right,  up till midnight, publishing on the new fence posts, the blog. That is surely where Thomas Paine would be writing today, and where I am proud to be writing tonight. This piece is 3,588 words long. Very short for Mr. Paine, pretty long for a blog. What can I say? Like the first pamphlets, it is free.)

I think the most challenging thing for me to understand about Donald Trump is that he is the symptom, not the disease.

He is the inevitable outcome of centuries of racism, economic inequality, and corporate greed.

I’m not really into self-flagellation, my life has been consistently privileged for all of its turns and twists. But he is helping me to find myself and know who I am.

Isn’t Donald Trump to blame for this mess, isn’t he to blame for everything? I mean, people like me and you couldn’t have had anything to do with it, could we?

When I write about politics, which I did reluctantly, but now do with joy, I write about myself, I know that.

I am no pundit; I have no big platform. And no, I have no desire to see my writing in the newspapers, they have no interest in me.  I don’t tell other people what to think or do. A writer’s sacred task is getting people to think, not to agree, to provoke, not to change minds. Paine provoked a country into a revolution. That will not happen here.

I have veered back and forth in my life between conservative ideas and so-called progressive ones; I am curiously in debt to Donald Trump.

When it comes to my country, I was asleep, and am still waking up, even after four years of cruelty, corruption,  lies, and cowardice. I should have seen this coming a long time ago. I didn’t. I don’t love my country less, but we are having a more authentic relationship.

Love, after all, is what you don’t want to see as well as what you do. Let’s get to it. The blood is flowing tonight.

If I had any doubts before, I don’t now. This is a President who hates our constitution and our democracy. He is picking away at it, piece by piece.

There is nothing like this week to jar a country out of slumber and ask people like me if they are willing to take responsibility for ignoring the many things we are morally bound to do.

“Let the young people do it,”  I heard a friend say, reassured at the thought. Hmmm, I thought. I was one of those young people once.

People e-mail me every day to tell me that Trump reminds them of Hitler, and I need to say I reject that extreme and, to me, false, analogy. That is the loss of perspective.

Trump, sir, and madam is no Hitler. He is not remotely that evil.

Besides, he is not especially well organized or even ruthless. Hitler was dreadfully efficient and horrifically successful.

President Trump has accomplished nothing much in our four years apart from building that ridiculous wall and undermining our democracy and its founding document, feathering the nests of his billionaire cronies, causing immigrants enormous suffering, wrecked the Supreme Court,  blowing a dread Pandemic, and then, a  tragic national racial breakdown.

I guess it sounds like a lot.

Trump is in no way as efficient or devastatingly affective as the worst dictators are and were. I find him destructive but not frightening.  He evokes a mean-spirited Elmer Fudd much more than Hitler. I am Elmer Fudd; I have a mansion and a yacht.

I just don’t see Mussolini pondering the values of sick people sipping some bleach when they are sick.

I know he is more interested in playing golf at one of his clubs that hunting me down.

It is, to me, absurd to bring Hitler into this chaos and turmoil and unfair to the President, for all of his dramatic failings. It is just a distraction to keep from looking at ourselves.

And we don’t need to compare him to anyone. He is bad enough just as he is.

Everything I see today in our countries has been boiling and bubbling for centuries, and all of my lengthening life.

We are all complicit, of course. George Floyd made a remarkable contribution to his country. We are woke.

Billions of people condemn one police officer; there is no one on the earth to defend him. I can’t help feeling some sympathy for anyone in that position. It is to easy to dump all of this on one very bad cop and lurch towards normalcy.

This time, I’m not sure that’s possible.

The left can blame Trump; the right can blame invisible leftist conspiracies, Trump blames anyone in sight. Who, exactly, is taking responsibility for anything?

There is nothing like seeing a police officer with his knee on a choking black man’s neck to get one focused. Trump is not responsible for all of this; he is just the symbol of our brokenness, the problem, not the cause or the solution or the resurrection, he is the  Frankenstein we all helped to create, and perhaps needed to create.

Many of our Founding Fathers were infused with a sense – however misguided – of right over wrong. But even they couldn’t deal with wrong when it was right in their faces.

It takes more than a village to make a mess like this; it takes a whole nation, year after year, generation after generation, century after century.

Our labels paralyze us.

No one side wishes to be seen as knee jerk lefties; nobody on the other wants to be seen as racist fanatics. Stalemate. As a result, nobody wants to do anything, so they do nothing for anyone but lobbyists and billionaires. They move pretty fast for them, the left and the right.

It turns out our land is not just the land of beautiful for spacious skies, but something of a charade, a gorgeous mask. There was always, from the first, this cancer,  a growth that needed to be acknowledged and cut out, but never was.

Slavery was the malignance, it casts its shadows still.

We saw it, especially on video after video these past few years, but we still never faced up to it, not now or a hundred plus years ago,  not even after sacrificing a half-million lives in part to end slavery.

African-Americans don’t need me to speak up for them or to say that racism is terrible. I don’t want to be standing on street corners holding up signs; it’s not for me. I salute the people who do it.

What I need to do is to make sure I look honestly at myself, and understand good, and then learn to be honest about it.

And then be sure to do it.

I have this fantasy that Trump is an angel sent down to earth to wake everybody up, and make people like me go, “whoa, something is really wrong.” We really can’t go on pretending we are one country with liberty and freedom for all.

We have to change a lot of paper bills and coins to be honest if there will still be any paper bills and coins. I’m afraid we are no longer one nation under God.

This works for me; it is better than hatred and obsessive worrying and hand wringing. Man up, Jon, this is going to be a wild ride, not for the faint of heart.

I would have to be blind not to see it, so I guess I was blind not to have seen it, even though I admit I did know something was very wrong.

Inspired by my brave refugee grandmother, I wrote a thousand times about my beautiful free country.

I guess I didn’t want to spoil it. It was one of my enduring Life Myths.

New work by psychological researchers, reported New York Times reporter Daniel Goleman in 1988,  shows that in telling their life stories, people invent a personal myth, a tale that, like the myths of old, explains the meaning and goals of their lives.

My life myth – very often true – was the lady in the harbor, holding up her light to the needy and oppressed.  I guess even the best myths can have a dark side. My grandmother wept at the sight of her.

Look how hard so many people – women, African-Americans, Latinos, the dream kids, trapped immigrant workers are fighting for safety and equality, brutalized slaves,  have been suffering for so long, and face a painful year, one of the worst for many.

The Pandemic is an almost Biblical reminder of how the poor are always with us, and they always suffer the most. Our President, the new champion of Jesus, hasn’t embraced this irony or even mentions it in his eternal Stalin (or maybe Fidel?) like rants.

It is easy to live a life in our country without seeing these people or awful things; it makes it easy to look away.

There is much to criticize about our President, but to me, the worst thing I see his cowardly failure to take responsibility for a single thing that he does.

To me, he is hollow at the center; his ideology is whatever works for him at the moment. All of us are actors in his show. The scariest thing for me are people with no core beliefs. They are capable of doing anything; they have no boundaries.

But I also see that we are much tougher people that the news reflects. I believe Donald Trump is going to get a good whupping this year, ugly and complicated, and close as it will be.

As a lifelong admirer of Jesus Christ, it hurt my heart to see this profoundly aspiritual and false man hide behind this Bible to get himself some votes and divide his people.

For most of our history, there was little argument about right and wrong when it came to the values of Jesus Christ and George Washington. Now, Jesus is just another photo op, and nobody pays much attention to George, who argued so intensely for separation of Church and State.

No wonder the young have no time for religion. The Rev. Franklin Graham, the betrayal of his father Billy Graham’s values and legacy, is one of Trump’s most sycophantic supporters, he loved the Bible photo op, he thinks Trump has been sent here by God to shunt more federal aid to Graham’s growing real estate holdings.

Poor Jesus, I hope he doesn’t come back.

I don’t care to be part of a movement that rejects  Christ and George  Washington both. That’s a big loss of our moral compasses.

Real Christians and people who believe in their actual values have some hard and painful work to do. Real patriots support the right to speak openly and freely. Lafayette Square on Friday was an eerie homage to China, where hundreds of heavily armed troops attacked unarmed and peaceful kids marching in Tiananmen Square.

A week ago, I would have thought that an absurd comparison. It doesn’t look so ludicrous to me now.

After his profoundly outrageous, even pathetic stunt with a Bible, the man who has obviously never read a Bible (if he had, he would never have been standing out there holding a bible in front of a shuttered church while the law-abiding people he swore to protect are rubbing “gas balls” out of their eyes and fleeing noise grenades), and disgraced the very name and beliefs of Jesus Christ.

Can any Christian truly believes this was the teaching of Christ written in that Bible the President was holding?)

If he had ever read the New Testament, he would have understood the narrative – Jesus said it, Christianity is all about love.

I didn’t see much love amidst the gas and noise bombs, or Donald Trump’s menacing scowl.

Our President spent much of Wednesday denying responsibility, his most consistent response to a crisis. It was the attorney general who ordered the gassing, not him. He is owed an apology, he said, it wasn’t tear gas but some other gas.

He had no idea the protesters were outside even though he stared at them from his bulletproof windows and bunkers and threatened them with tweets all weekend and promised to call out the Army. That was one promise he could keep.

On Monday,  his day of shame and revelation, he said he had no idea they were there at all.

It turns out the left and the right are places to hide for the weak and power-mad. Evangelical leaders scrambled to praise Trump for his spiritual depth and strength.

Christianity was, for many years, our moral compass and guide. Christian leaders today build billion-dollar castles of worship and fawn over politicians. It is important to remember the truth and the sanctity of right and wrong.

There is nothing absolutely wrong any longer, nothing that is absolutely right.

Donald Trump has taught me something even more critical than my puny IRA, and that is that what matters is right and wrong, not left and right.

What I have to fight for is the truth, the gift of a righteous battle. I want to be one of those people who knows it is better not to participate in the wrong things—a bitter lesson for me and at my age no less.

Once we all understand that, if we do,  I believe that  Trump will vanish as if by a magic wand, although we will be mopping up his moral diarrhea for decades.

He is already beginning to disintegrate, pieces of him flaking off under that nest on his head, like a special effect in a Superhero movie.

I can’t wait to see what he looks like when his Variable threat Response Battle Suit, a/k/the “suitcase suit” he borrowed from Iron Man, comes peeling off.

The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote after surviving Hitler that it might be easier to turn to Shakespeare or Dostoevsky to understand villains and the nature of evil.

The great villains, she found,  were all aware of the possibilities of human wickedness.

What we almost lost in all of the gradual metastasizing of truth and right into an argument rather than a reality – our national cancer – was the assertion, upheld by all philosophers whoever touched the question, was this:

That there is a distinction between right and wrong, and that it is an absolute distinction, unlike those in contemporary America, the shape-shifting between left and right, red and blue, conservative and liberal.

In our time, the right thing is not a shared belief, but a perpetual argument that can’t be resolved, the good that can’t be recognized.

Each side claims an exclusive right to truth, and so all that is left to us are lies.

The underlying assumption of all moral philosophies, Arendt wrote, is that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

There it is, I thought when I read that with a wince, I suffered much in my life, but never once chose to suffer wrong rather than to do wrong, or to even really see wrong.

The few who did were shunted aside, pushed to the edges, left behind, assassinated, jailed, or prosecuted, but always forgotten.  Nobody wanted to hear it; we were too busy working hard for health care, waiting for bargains on Black Friday, cutting taxes for the rich,  and planning for a “safe” retirement.

We could hardly bear to pay attention to our leaders for years, too much time on Facebook and Twitter, confusing it with real-life until we can no longer tell the difference.

How is that working out for us?

Trump is teaching me a lot. And I will keep my eyes open, so I can keep learning.

I just never had to come to terms with right and wrong, and neither, it seems, did my country. I suppose in many ways, that is what privilege is.

There is one comparison to Nazism and modern America, I thought, as I re-read Arendt’s brilliant exploration of morality, Responsibility, and Judgement.

“If you examine the few, the very few, who in the moral collapse of Nazi Germany remained completely intact and free of all guilt, you will discover that they never went through anything like a great moral conflict or crisis of conscience. They did not ponder the various issues – they did not feel an obligation to do anything, but what was right.

The right was not an argument to them, not dithering, not a debate.

The heroes in Germany, Arendt wrote, said, “This I can’t do, rather than this, “I ought not to do.”

The great tragic morality play before us is the four police officers in Minneapolis, hapless scapegoats in our national hand-wringing. To be guilty for these policemen is to be no longer be considered human.

There is Officer Derk Chauvin, at the center of this awful storm,  seen to be committing an inexplicable and horrific act of cruelty and murder right on video.

Then there are the three officers, who watched him do it and could have stopped him and saved him, and themselves.

They had the same choice the many good people in Germany had when the Nazi’s came to power.

None of the four seemed to understand right from wrong or understand what to do, and how, I wonder, can we pile all the blame on them when almost all of us did the same thing in very different ways?

We are a country of watchers, posters, sharers. Our children don’t go outside much anymore. Social media is our meeting ground.

Perhaps it is our country that never had a firm grip on right and wrong. Why should we expect that even trained and sworn police officers would grasp it.

I know there is much goodness in America. I see it every day. But I also know that it takes an earthquake to get most people – to get me –  to wake up and see what has always been right under our noses.

The heroes of Germany, Arendt wrote,  “never doubted that crimes remained crimes even if legalized by the government and that it was better not to participate in these crimes under any circumstances.”

The three officers who watched were not protecting or supporting  Chauvin; now the most reviled and targeted human in America (I’m sorry, I’ve never been comfortable around mobs, even righteous ones, they are frightening), they were condemning him to a life in prison.)

All three were indicted Wednesday for aiding and abetting murder.

And on Friday, we also saw those policemen and soldiers in Washington, in their Darth Vader armored suits, firing gas and throwing noise grenades at innocent people.

There were lots of witnesses to what the soldiers did, including many reporters and bystanders. The soldiers obeyed orders and charged into those protesters with clubs, gas, and noise grenades.

The President will never understand how much more complicated he made the lives and work of the thousands of police officers thrown between us and so much rage and fury.

That is always their lot. We throw them into the fire and then condemning them for the burning.

They are not Nazi’s either, or close to it, but echoes sometimes chill the blood.

Do they get a free ride? Not one of them said: “no, I’m not going to do this; this is wrong.”

If they were all complicit, then aren’t all of us, haven’t we been sitting back and watching black people die awful deaths for centuries?

Yesterday, after Trump’s egregious Bible Photo Op, the left immediately began comparing him to Hitler, the other side to the very new interpretation of Jesus’ as a fighter against that radical left (of which he was one in his time.).

Wrong and evil have become multiple-choice exercises, not moral imperatives.

But I think, somewhere deep down, almost everyone knows wrong when they saw it. You can always tell how big a mistake Trump has made by the number of lies he says about them the next day.

For me, the challenge is to be a human, not just a person, which is the corporate ideal for all of us, and the fate of many of us. It is tough to afford being moral in this country.

You have to have a good job and a lot of money just to have a place to sleep and some health care.

The choice is not really between Biden and Trump. The decision has always been between right and wrong.

Morally, wrote Arendt, the only reliable people when the chips are down are those who say, “I can’t.”

I’m paying attention now, thanks to Mr. Trump.

I get nothing from hating him; I get so much from learning from him.

I love being in the Army Of Good.

I’m also ready to enlist in the Army Of Truth, our own new and very personal Valley Forge. I want to light that torch again and help finish the great work.

Summer soldiers stay home.