One Small Voice: Buckle up for a bumpy ride ahead

It is now day 30 of the United States Government shutdown, the big one, the longest in U.S. history, the one for the books, the one they’ll be talking about like the housing crisis of 2008 or the Enron scandal. Financial disasters that changed the lives of thousands, only this time it may be life-changing for millions, with a recovery that takes a decade or more to be realized.

Won’t it be great?  Stories told around the dinner table about Americans suffering due to the hubris and manipulation of a few Republican lawmakers.  Anecdotes about how families gave up cable TV, kids’ music lessons and dance classes, about how they learned to get by with one vehicle, with groceries provided by food pantries because public assistance was cut off due to the shutdown – even though there used to be two paychecks coming in from two adult workers.

Stories about the working poor becoming the working indigent.  And if the shutdown goes on long enough, about life as bad as it was during the Great Depression.  Who knows, we might have new Hoover-towns, renamed Trump-towns, where the homeless live communally under bridges or in public parks, pooling their scant resources.  Maybe there would once again be cooperatives formed by those of modest means, enough to share living quarters, household chores, and the financial resources of those lucky enough to have jobs.  Small “c” communism in order to survive.

It warms the heart just to imagine it while we watch our fearful leader, Donald J. Trump, dig in his spoiled-brat heels while he whines and wails for a border wall.

Right now The Donald says he will never let up, never give in.  He will “go to the mattresses,” in the words from The Godfather, to fulfill his campaign promise to deliver security for America from the evil hordes that have yet to show even one hair on their heads at the Mexican border, but that he claims are just a whisper away from raping, thieving, and murdering us all!

What will it take for our misguided, egotistical president to see his folly and come to his senses?

I fear it will take an honest-to-God tragedy of security failure in a place where there is a real possibility it could occur.  Where, you might ask?  An American airport.

Already we are hearing about the abnormal numbers of sick calls by TSA agents and air traffic controllers, particularly in Atlanta.  Such sick calls are up by 137% over the same time last year.  Travelers are being told to be at the airport three hours before flight time because it is taking a minimum of one hour just to get through preflight screening.  Already we are hearing mental health professionals speaking of the severely declining morale of TSA workers who are compelled to report for a job which yields no monetary compensation. We are hearing that some cannot report because they cannot afford child or elder care or gasoline for the car if they are not being paid.  We hear that workers are working distracted because of worries beyond their control.

So how far away can we be, honestly, from someone getting through screening with a weapon – a box cutter, a gun, a bomb – and causing an in-flight accident, a crash, or worst-case scenario a 9-11 copy-cat act?

And here we citizens sit, waiting on true leadership to emerge from Washington in the form of a president who is not impotent, or a Republican Party that has not been emasculated by that president.  Nero fiddling while Rome burns?  Airplanes falling from the sky while Trump whines?

I’m not the only person to have these thoughts of an honest-to-God security breach.  When I got to the library Thursday morning for my shift, a couple of friends were saying that such a scenario was the talk around their kitchen tables, too.

And our sad consensus was that, should something like this happen, Trump wouldn’t care.  He’d find some way to blame it on Democrats, and spin it around the border issue, rather than face the fact that the truer threats were not at the border, but elsewhere, as he has been told for many months by smarter thinkers than he.

Now, on Saturday, Jan. 19, Trump has come before the American public in a televised address to attempt to sell us, again, on the necessity of his wall, in the guise of a lame “compromise” with Congress.  A plan, he says, that has come about through meetings with influential Democrats reaching collegial consensus that this allocation of funds for comprehensive border security is a new and improved version that everyone should be happy to embrace.

It appears to me that The Donald has realized, perhaps too late, that he has dealt himself a very poor hand from a deck he unwittingly stacked strongly against himself.  This hand is so poor, yet he doesn’t understand that it’s time to fold and get out while he still can.

Fact checkers had a field day during and after this latest display of arrogance.  (Citations can be found online from CNN and MSNBC.)   Trump held fast to the idea that 5.7 billion dollars was still a reasonable expenditure for wall border security.  Even as more than 300 illegals, mostly families, women and children, and unaccompanied children seeking asylum were tunneling under an existing barrier near Yuma, AZ, he claimed America was under attack by criminals and drug cartels exporting their wares across the border.  He didn’t waver from the lies and manipulation of statistics he has used to suit his flawed logic.

I was particularly struck by the cost breakdown Trump provided viewers for this improved plan.  $800 million for urgent humanitarian aid at the border.  $805 million to be spent on drug detection technology.  Unestimated costs for 2750 additional border agents and 75 immigration judge teams.  (My own imprecise and uneducated guess for these would not top $150 million.)  Subtotal costs for these could be $1.75 billion.  Only about one third of the proposed cost of Trump’s Folly, the border wall, still coming in at a whopping $5.7 billion.

No matter how you cut it, Trump’s latest attempt to fulfill the campaign promise of a wall is still extortion.  It is still an attempt by the president to circumvent the rule of co-equal branches of government.

And it appears that his beloved base is beginning to erode under the weight of Trump’s deceptions, and the weight of the government shutdown, which is costly not only in our tax dollars, but in the emotional and financial costs to hundreds of thousands of federal workers not taking home a paycheck.

Earlier this week Chuck Todd of Meet The Press speculated what it would take for the President to end the shutdown.  Todd did not endorse this strategy but suggested that only a total refusal of all federal employees to show up for work could shake Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the Republican Senate loose from this ill-conceived stunt to coerce a border wall.

Todd may be right, but before that would happen I believe it more likely that we will, as a nation, experience a scenario similar to that with which I began this piece. 

The world is watching us.  The free world puzzles over how we, the great United States of America, got ourselves in this mess.  Russia, China and North Korea marvel at how easy it would be to bamboozle this clown of a president without him ever seeing it coming.  And, more importantly, a sinister ISIS or other terrorist group, who, by the way, have not been eradicated, can exploit our vulnerable places to wreak their evil on us, the Great Satan, as they perceive us.

I hate the overall sense of powerlessness in this situation.  I write and call my congress people, to no avail that I can see.  It seems the only solution lies with a megalomaniac who cannot be reasoned with, or prevailed upon to give a rat’s furry rear.

To paraphrase Bette Davis in her 1950 film All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”  And a plastic Jesus on your dashboard might not hurt either.