The world has never been a peaceful place. While there were periods of relative peace, overall it's been mostly wars and rumors of wars since time began.
The United States has many serious problems but for the last decade or so it's been difficult to address these problems because our former president, Barack Obama, was forced to deal with an obstructionist Congress, states that were out-of-control, stupid and indifferent governors, state legislatures, mayors, city council, school boards, etc.
The Christian right has in recent years reared its ugly head and the rest of us have paid and are paying a terrible price as they work to decimate scientific knowledge, public schools, common sense, the Constitution, indeed the Commonwealth as we have known it for the past 200 plus years.
However, in spite of all the problems, some of us have felt, perhaps naively, a sense of safety. We had a president who struggled to do the right thing against unbelievable odds, but through it all, we knew him to be an intelligent, decent human being, who would not go off the rails on some whim, no matter how provoked he was. And he was provoked!
Unfortunately, our new president is insane. I mean that in a clinical sense. He's not just sort of nuts, he is certifiable. I'm not a psychologist but I do have an graduate degree in counseling and he portrays in his person most if not all of the characteristics of an insane person.
What he has done in his first 100 years is turn back the clock 100 years; he has unsettled the world. We can no longer wake up in the morning knowing that our president is not going to start a nuclear holocaust which will destroy the earth and everything on it. We know he might do such a thing while laying about at Mar-a-Lago because he claims he ordered the Syrian strike while having dinner there with a foreign visitor!
Here are some specifics:
* Many of his appointees come from Wall Street and are the same persons responsible for the great financial melt-down of 2008. His Treasury Secretary is none other than "Foreclosure King" Steve Mnuchin who is reputed to be without either conscience or feelings and is responsible for foreclosing on more than 36,000 homes. This does not bode well for people struggling to pay off big mortgages.
* Trump has chopped off all efforts to deal with global warming. His head of the EPA is Scott Pruitt, who has fought to kill the EPA for years, who denies the fact of global warming or at least that humans are responsible. It will not be long before our coastal cities will be under water but global warming has many other global effects, damaging farmer's crops and helping to destroy the seas upon which our planet depends for life.
* His Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, known as a "king of bankruptcy," is a fan of increased coal use which will increase global warming and continue to decimate the lives of thousands of people living in southeastern states.
* Trump believes in deregulation and in a recent interview with Fox Business News bragged about how he is in process of deregulating everything, which he thinks will help boost the economy. It won't do that, but it will make our food and water unsafe to eat or drink. It will make our drugs deadly to take. It will make our highways and byways dangerous to drive. It will allow the predator plutocrats who now run the country to take the rest of us for a financial ride which will end for many in death and despair.
* Trump is an "America First" kind of guy who has concluded that it is his right and responsibility to ensure that the rest of the world follows our lead in all things. We have sent missiles into Syria which seemed to have no impact at all except to kill a bunch of people and make our relationship with Russia, always a shaky one, even more difficult.
Trump has in 100 short days turned most of the world against us and has increased the chance of war with several countries, including one also led by an insane person with nuclear weapons, North Korea.
* Minorities of whatever stripe are scared to death - literally in many cases, as Trump and his henchmen seek out aliens to jail and/or deport. It matters not to them if families are struck asunder or if little children are stripped from their parents. These people, led by that swaggering little criminal, Jeff Sessions, (doesn't he remind you of Himmler?) are almost identical to the jack-booted Nazi thugs throwing Jews on the trains all across Europe in the 1940s.
* Public education is on a death watch. The person in charge, a "born-again" Christian with more money than god, hates public education and has worked all of her life to destroy it and she is now in process of doing just that. Teachers everywhere wander into their classrooms in the mornings wondering what fresh hell they will face that day from faceless, hostile bureaucrats.
* Those of us who depend on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are all also swirling in fear amidst a variety of rumors that these lifelines will soon be taken from us by nefarious monsters in Trump's White House and with Trump's blessing. We have learned quickly that in spite of Trump's promises to the contrary those rumors may well come true for Trump does not keep his promises; in fact, part of his insanity is that he doesn't even remember his promises!
If you can't sleep at night, it's a sign that you are a sane and sensible person. But remember you're not alone. There are millions of us in the same boat. And we need to keep bailing to stay afloat which means working to rid ourselves of this insane monster inhabiting the presidential offices.
