We can all see it. It is beyond political parties. Beyond ideology. Beyond whether he is corrupt or competent.
David Brooks, on the PBS NewsHour after the Trump and Zelenskyy meeting at the White House:
All my life, I’ve had a certain idea about America. That we’re a flawed country, but we’re fundamentally a force for good in the world. That we defeated Soviet Union, we defeated fascism, we did the Marshall Plan, we did PEPFAR to help people live in Africa. And we make mistakes. Iraq, Vietnam. But they’re usually mistakes out of stupidity, naivete, and arrogance. They’re not because we’re ill-intentioned.
What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely. Vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel. Vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen.
So what do we do? I don’t know. It feels too big. Since 2016 I’ve just tried to focus on a few positive things. Building Micro.blog is a big part of that, helping more people blog.
On a personal level, we can also do the opposite of whatever we see from Trump:
- Don’t treat other people with disrespect.
- Don’t get caught up in disinformation.
- Don’t vilify people we disagree with.
- Don’t exaggerate our differences.
- Don’t blow things out of proportion.
- Don’t get outraged over small things.
- Don’t fuel divisiveness.
I want to be better about noticing when I fall into extremes, missing nuance, missing the big picture. That’s not to say we should “both sides” everything, though. It’s more that we can try to be thoughtful in how we communicate, even when we all have different perspectives.
We can care about other people. Trump is incapable of empathy. His legacy cannot be anything but division. He will be bitter until the end, leaving behind a world out of balance, and disappointment and exhaustion in all the people he has dragged down with him.
