Our president, the disreputable Donald J. Trump, says we can call his wall “Peaches” if it makes it easier to approve the 5.7 billion dollars he would like earmarked for the construction of a wall along our southern border with Mexico!

What fresh, absurd, new hell have we entered where an elected official – the highest elected official in the land – can hold hostage 800,000 federal workers, and  the estimated 3.7 million collateral workers in the private sector, to extort billions of dollars of the peoples’ money to build a wall that, even by the reckonings of a reliable cross section of conservative thinkers, is ill-advised, financially wasteful, redundant in purpose, and ignores technological advances that could provide actual protection from imagined and real threats from outside our borders?

Every day I hope to wake up to find that our fearful leader has seen the light and given up on his egomaniacal wall.

Every day I hope to find that his lackeys and bootlickers have stood up to him and said NO MORE! to the destructive forces he has unleashed on all Americans with his government shutdown.

It is crystal clear that Donald Trump cares not one hairy rat’s behind about the people whose lives he is destroying, about the government chaos he has created, the wasteful spending he has engendered, that will continue long into our futures to restore order created by this shutdown.  He has no sense of – or, more importantly, care for – the bigger picture unfolding before us because he made a ridiculous promise to his base, then whipped that promise into a mindless frenzy by appealing to their basest fears and biases.

To add to the mayhem, Republicans and conservatives of many stripes are making false claims that Democrats and liberals of all kinds do not want secure borders.  Those right-wingers want everyone to buy into the fear-mongering lies that a few anecdotal stories of true tragedy committed by a minuscule percentage of illegal aliens represent a vast wave of rape, murder, thievery and wanton disregard of the lives of “real” Americans that the press refuses to report on.

I find it very hard to believe that smart, educated men and women can be bamboozled into this line of thinking, then support the actions of a megalomaniacal, would-be tyrant as he sets about his destructive agenda.

Since Dec. 22, 2018 – twenty-two days by my reckoning as I write this – an enormous number of people have been thrown into varying states of fear and anxiety over their financial survival.

If we break it down, based on reliable news sources and government statistics, approximately 800,000 of those people are federal employees who are considered non-essential.  They include government agency office workers, as well as the maintenance people, custodial and security workers, and cafeteria staffers who man federal offices all over the United States, not just in the District of Columbia.  (I have tried to find numbers for the Grand Rapids area, based on the number employed at the Gerald R. Ford Federal Building, to bring this situation home, without success.)

Then there are the collateral victims of the shutdown in Washington and in numerous cities and towns like Grand Rapids. It is estimated — and this is a high estimate — that 3.7 million workers are affected in the private sector nationwide.  These would be your relatives, friends and neighbors who work in food service (restaurants and food trucks), who staff parking garages, or who drive taxies or Ubers, people who work as contract workers on special projects, or who are independent contractors who provide services for the feds.

Unless you are one of these people, you are related to or live next door to or go to church with those affected, the numbers exist without context, devoid of emotion.  But to those who may see the repo man taking their cars, or who may see penalties or interest added to their debt (mortgages, credit cards, etc.), or whose credit scores may tank due to no reported income, they know the personal disasters that are the tsunami-size “ripples” of one man’s temper tantrum fueled by his prejudices and imaginings.

Our president has said he owns this shutdown, that he alone bears the mantle of it and does not blame the Democrats.  (You’ve seen the film and heard the audio.)  Mitch McConnell has become his partner in crime by refusing to bring to the Senate floor the legislation passed by the Democratic House of Representatives to reopen all but Homeland Security.  Senate Republicans have signed on as complicit participants by vowing to vote down anything the president says he will not support.

By all reasonable measure, there is no one else to blame for one man’s attempt to extort a wall from you and me.

We got here because a huge number of electors bought snake oil from a charlatan. These electors preferred the spectacle of Trump’s theater over the boring, overwhelming qualifications of a woman whose own past is circumspect.

Now we are grappling with the consequences.

Trump supporters are plagued with the reality that they have welcomed the fox into the henhouse, yet they are not willing to own up to it and do something to fix the situation.

Trump nay-sayers are losing patience with their inability to affect a solution to the carnage.

Tribalism reigns, and the voices of reason are lost among the chanting and drum beats.

It is well past time to cease and desist.

It is time to sit down and be unemotional, to be completely academic and analytical with regard to facts, not fictions, about immigration and its promises and pitfalls.

I find myself pining for the idealistic benevolent despot my Ma used to invoke when she became world-weary.  She envisioned a wise, modern-day King Solomon who could cut through the bullshit to the true heart of governance, but who she knew was a pipe dream.

I wish she were still here to tell me that everything will be all right, even though she would know the truth, that we are headed to hell in a handbasket of our own weaving.