Anyone who considers that fate will either point you to your destiny or drag you there, probably understands that the use of reasonably intelligent forward-thinking can go a long way in determining the manner in which one's destiny is met. As such, let us all hope that America's destiny -- and by default, that of Planet Earth's -- is not completely shaped by the now predictable pattern of shortsighted political behavior our electorate has shown of itself over the course of the past several decades.
For all the needlessly boastful blather we put forth about America's exceptionalism, our nation seems to be evolving into as a society where cognitive dissonance runs roughshod over sensible insight, where conspiracy theories easily strike down proven science, and where willful ignorance effortlessly holds intelligent foresight well at bay. Indeed, it's that lure of instant gratification inherent to shortsighted thinking that has helped to reduce revelations about trump's fiendishly hair-raising, Ukraine-based " dollars for dirt on Biden " election-rigging scheme to non-issue status for a wide segment of the Republican base, including all but one Senate Republican from Utah. After all, as long as current outcomes continue to swing in your favor, why worry about any potential future negative consequences that a second round of foreign interference in America's election process may bring?
In 1972, Richard Nixon won a second term in a landslide in spite of the electorate's prior knowledge of his campaign staff having burglarized the Democratic National Committee's Watergate headquarters. And many of us -- particularly those of the "boomer" generation -- are probably well-aware of how voters' decision back then to ignore yet another ominous indicator of Nixon's dark character and return him to the White House turned out, not only for Nixon, but for the nation as a whole.
In 2004, there was widespread skepticism about the legitimacy of the rationale used to justify our war with Iraq. Disbelief which was later confirmed by revelations in the Downing Street Memos) that the intelligence had indeed been "fixed around" the support of U.S. policy objectives. Also, by 2004 America had also experienced two recessions triggered in part, by Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003(which also helped fuel 2007's Great Depression). Yet despite all this, to the shock of most of the world, America went ahead and subsequently reelected George W. Bush that year, an outcome that prompted the following headline by the Britain's Daily Mirror : "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?"
And now, nearly 50 years after the Nixon and Bush results, and there's no reason to assume that -- despite having been impeached for his Ukraine caper -- trump won't be re-elected via the same combination of short-term thinking and a knowingly flawed electoral process that enabled him to become president in the first place. If, as Shakespeare famously asserted, "past is prologue," it could mean that there are potentially millions of voters across key electoral college states prepared to once again blindly throw caution to the wind and further entrust a second go around at the presidency to a political novice who was duly impeached during his first go around.
Indeed, such ritualistic idolatry could lead one to believe that for vast numbers of his supporters, donald trump symbolizes a flesh and blood incarnation of Aesculapius, aka the "blameless physician" of Greek mythology. Because despite all of the chaos that has ensued during his three years as president, an astonishing 85 percent of the GOP base continue to approve of trump's performance in office.
Meanwhile, with Joe Biden's fellow Democratic presidential candidates seemingly hell-bent on making him the Democrat's 2020 version of 2016's Jeb Bush, and GOP diligently working to brand the rest of the field as either wild-eyed socialists, misguided billionairesor Clinton Administration re-treads , only time will tell whether Americans will further allow the tenuous lure of base level shortsightedness to override the more realistic promises that may result from the use of long-range pragmatism in our choice of leaders.
Year of Perfect Vision?
So, what lies ahead with regard to the future of humanity? Planet Earth won't get a clearer picture until after Americans cast their vote in the 2020 presidential election. That is, of course, unless the U.S. Senate -- which as of this writing, had been the only institution on Earth with the power to potentially save humanity by prematurely ending trump's "presidency" -- had found the courage to briefly overcome its own susceptibility to political shortsightedness and voted to throw the president out of office first. But again, among those for whom the past is prologue principle drives part of their thinking, predicting the outcome of trump's impeachment saga was fairly easy.
In the case of Nixon, it wasn't until after completing a fairly noteworthy first term that the illegal re-election activity occurred that subsequently led to his resignation two years into his second term. This time, in the run-up to his own re-election campaign, history seems to be repeating itself as it is trump who faced expulsion for his own attempt at election tampering. But of course as of this writing, occurring just hours prior to the Senate's vote on the matter, virtually no one was predicting anything close to Nixon-like development that would see trump's presidency end with his resignation. That's because Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairperson the Senate Judiciary Committee, had given prior notice of trumps fate.
"I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here," Graham admitted just one day prior to trump's mid-December impeachment by the House. "This thing will come to the Senate, and it will die quickly..."
And while the effort to remove trump from office did indeed "quickly die" in the Senate, Planet Earth has somehow managed survive from its earliest beginnings all the way to 2020; the year of perfect vision. But how long can the planet survive in the aftermath donald trump's acid reign? Will the year 2020 also turn out to be an accurate measurement of the clarity of America's collective hindsight?
That's something that remains to be, umm, seen.
However, I, for one, have my doubts.
Because, as noted earlier, in America, history all too often repeats itself.
Not by chance, but by design.
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