Donald Trump has a few months left in his term, but I'm already thinking of him in the past tense and looking towards the future. The people of the United States have had to waste so much time on that guy when we could have been dealing with pressing issues like global warming, the increasing injustices of American capitalism, plastic waste in the oceans, housing crises, prisons and police officers...
And over the past 20-odd years, we all had to deal with a ton of Culture War bullshit, because the political party that seems to be set up entirely to limit the voting rights of non-white Americans decided to use those disagreements as political wedge issues. So lots of people wound up spending their energy and time on trying to get rid of the stupid anti-gay-marriage laws that sprang up in the final decades of the 20th century, the blatant voting suppression, the hasty and slapdash attempts to limit the rights of trans people, the ever-increasing restrictions on abortion, on and on, I'm tired of it, you're tired of it, we're all tired of this nonsense.
But in a larger sense, the United States has been engaged in a Culture War ever since the first stirrings of Abolitionism -- so much of American political agitation has been towards the end of trying to establish full and prosperous citizenship for non-white people, countered by horrifying violence every step of the way, and you know, I'm sick and tired of that struggle as well, because we could have been talking about land reform and environmental stewardship and climate change and other boring but important things --
But instead the concept of race divided this country and distracted us from those concerns. Which it may have been invented for in the first place.
As it is, there are pressing matters to attend to, and the last 4 years have been like trying to get an angry wildcat out of a house whose roof is currently leaking, said wildcat being invited by people who would rather have the roof collapse than let anyone else in.
We have actual work to do. We have serious structural problems with our current economy that go all the way back to the beginnings of capitalism, and maybe even all the way back to the concept of wealth accumulation in the first place. Nobody has ever accumulated great wealth except by dumping the costs of that acquisition onto the people least equipped to resist, and under industrial capitalism the associated costs shifted into the abstract realm of currency, but didn't get any better.
I don't want to be distracted from that matter by having to address yet another attempt to restrict someone's voting rights. But, here we are, still with the party dedicated to that distraction.
I wish them all the luck Donald Trump had in his golf-course investments.