Symptoms of a Sick Society

 

Pundits have been claiming for years that Donald J. Trump is not the cause of the insanity which is MAGA; he is but a symptom. The same is said for Tucker Carlson, Ron DeSantis and a host of other MAGA-mutts.

That’s a decent assertion to make; all of the racism, bigotry, greed, authoritarianism and disdain for education witnessed in the writings, bleating and clamoring of the alt/right can be traced to earlier times in the noble, yet flawed, American experiment. 

Much of the fault and many of the tragic missteps could be accounted for by the on-going changes in social mores. As Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us; “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The sins of the past – slavery, disenfranchisement, etc – are rectified and addressed by the newer generation with a more ‘modern’ sense of justice and righteousness. 

One can, furthermore, understand the desire to mitigate the corrosive effects of psychotic personalities by claiming that political actors such as Trump, Hannity, Cotton, Gaetz, MTG, Cawthorn and Boebert are not truly indicative of inherent political and social rot but, rather, are merely symptoms which can be handily dealt with by level-headed care-givers and the application of analgesics. 

However, Trump and his MAGA-cult cannot and must not be dismissed simply as ‘symptoms’ of sickness in the body politic. To do so would be a monumental error. It would be akin to dismissing the inability to breathe as just a symptom of COVID-19 or pneumonia. Indeed, shortness of breath is a symptom but it is a life-threatening one; one that indicates the need for drastic action; hospitalization, intensive care, a prescribed regimen of pharmacological treatments.

That is where we find the democratic republic known as the United States of America; gasping for life. The symptoms are dire and life-threatening. (Think January 6^th) They must be handled with thoughtful aplomb and rational action.

As the pandemic tightens its strangle-hold on society with increasingly infectious and fatal variants, the metaphor could not be clearer; we must, as a nation, as a society, bite the bullet and take the bitter pill which will alleviate and ultimately eliminate the diseases of racism and economic inequality and thereby remove the symptoms such as Donald Trump from our body politic.