Sunday, July 05, 2020

Normal America

Many American evangelicals are getting stirred up about President Trump. They think the nation that is being ruined by a highly abnormal president. They see the next presidential election as pivotal because they fear that the President has set the nation on a dangerous path from which it will struggle to recover.

The reality is that Donald Trump will be gone in four years’ time, and quite likely in six months’ time. I suspect that nothing much will change when he goes because he is a symptom of a problem, not the underlying problem itself. That problem has been there for a long time, so it will remain for a long time after he as gone.

Changing a president does not change a nation's behaviour, because the government-spirits that controlled the election of the president will still be in place when he is gone. The United States has been dominated by spirits of war and violence and power from its inception, partly because it was birthed out of war. These violent and warring spirits ensure that the nation elects a president who loves war and military dominance. If a peace-loving person like Obama is elected president, these spirits will transform him/her into a warmonger.

Donald Trump claimed that he would withdraw America from unnecessary wars, but he has not succeeded. The violent and warring spirits that control the nation have worked with the establishment to keep the nation involved in wars all over the world.

Donald Trump was not an aberration. He was a perfect choice for the government-spirits that control the United States. A brash bully is just what they wanted to lead an arrogant nation that they use to bully the other nations of the world.

Caitlin Johnston has a perceptive article, despite not understanding the spiritual powers behind what she observed. She says that “Donald Trump is a very normal US president”.

Trump is a very normal president, the media just yell about this president a lot more than usual because he puts an ugly face on the horrific normal that was already there. Sure he makes rude tweets and says dumb things and has made a mess of the pandemic response, but by and large when you strip away the narrative overlay Trump has been a reliable establishment lapdog advancing more or less all the same status quo imperialist and oligarchic agendas as the presidents who came before him. There are just a lot of establishment loyalists with a vested interest in spinning the ugliness his oafishness is exposing as caused by and unique to him.
If people could only open their eyes, the President is revealing the heart of the nation and the government spirits at work in it.
It isn’t Trump’s abnormality that makes him truly heinous, it’s his normality. It’s his perpetuation of a status quo which is brutal, corrupt, and utterly fascistic. And which got there long before he did.

Going back to how it was before Trump was elected is not the solution, because that was just as bad.

Wanting America to go back to how it was before Trump is wanting the conditions which gave rise to Trump. This is like landing at the bottom of a well and wishing you could go back in time to a few moments earlier when you were merely falling down the well. Wanting the same status quo austerity, exploitation, oppression and warmongering that made people so angry they wanted an obnoxious demagogue to come knock over the whole apple cart in the first place is just rewinding the same horror movie to the scene right before the scene that’s scaring you.

The only solution is real change.
This is what your government is, America. This is what it’s always been. If you don’t like what you’re seeing, don’t just try to put a nicer mask on it so you can go back to sleep. Change it. Change your normal. Create a new normal.

Trump is everything America is. As one reader recently put it, “Trump didn’t make things the way they are, he is the personification of the situation. If the United States was a suit, then it was tailor-made for Trump.”

Trump is normal. If you don’t like your normal, America, then push for real change, not cosmetic change. It’s not going to come from any president. It’s going to have to come from you.

That change will require a change of heart that frees it from the powerful government-spirit that controls it.

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