Let’s stop shouting and pouting

I seem to be surrounded by fellow citizens who are indelibly confused. They are everywhere. Americans who, after previous election losses, would have simply grumbled and grouched, are now disconsolate, and their opposites, who everyone agrees won the election, seem to be unusually uncertain about it, as well.

And I? Well, I seem to be like a poor soldier caught between two armies: those who absolutely, utterly and without pause hate Donald J. Trump and can barely pronounce the word “president” anywhere near his name, and those Trumpists who are still so angry about the “establishment” and how it humiliated them that they cannot abide any rational discussion.

Then when you read about the scene in the White House, with the president strolling around, not quite knowing where he is, surrounded by a mere six or eight close aides, systems and structures unattended, the question of what judgments to make hangs, lonely indeed, over the morning sky.

But being the rational, thoughtful person I am, I have determined to offer up to my confused fellow citizens and compatriots-in-hope some alternatives to despair, anger — and just doing nothing.

Please appreciate my dilemma. I could have written about what is surely a Russian attack on eastern Ukraine right after President Trump spoke to the Ukrainian president, showing how strong and virile is Trump’s man, Vladimir Putin.

I could have composed something about the American drone strike on faraway Yemen, and even posed the delicate question: “What the hell are we doing in Yemen?”

But why not use this time — and now I am being serious — in sober study of some questions underlying all of this?

Let’s think about why Americans voted for Donald Trump, about who these voters really are, and why their inner rage and their outer political expression have changed this country, without many Americans even suspecting it.

Why did the so-called “elites” — the word given to virtually anyone who graduates from college today — so blind themselves to that white working class “out there” between the oceans? Why did so many experts offer so little to these seeking citizens?

So, let’s say that seriously studying up on where we are as a nation is one way to productively fill our days. And others?

Well, we could, instead, effectively take on the rhetorical rags of the president and his followers, employ his and their vulgar language, tweets and tricks, hang on the repetitive cable news accounts so lacking in any human impulse, and wallow in the noise and chaos of that world.

(Please don’t think I’m being only critical. I may be one of the few Americans who are tempted to agree that, when President Trump told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly when he criticized Putin, that “We’ve got a lot of killers,” and that a lot of people have died at America’s hands, Trump was right! There, I’ve said it. Shoot me.)

Then, of course, there are those Americans who want to establish a new politics that, as difficult as it might be, would blend the best of the liberal critique of society (human rights, civil rights, moderate welfare programs, control and punishment for Wall Street malefactors, a principled foreign policy, for starters); and the best (yes!) of what Trump offers so many Americans (true legal immigration control, bringing rogue American corporations home, a return to the Protestant ethic in capitalism, the creation of jobs here, instead of exporting them, to name a few.)

Mikhail Gorbachev was quoted as saying, “It’s never too late to do something good.” With apologies to the fellow who destroyed the Soviet Union he tried to save, I’d say, “It’s never too late to do something smart.”

I saw an old friend of mine the other day, Dr. Alush Gashi, a respected doctor and parliamentarian from Kosovo whom I knew during the horrible Balkans wars of the 1990s.

He asked me, about America, “Do you think the Trump experience will wake up the fuzzy old American establishment that brought him on?”

I said I didn’t know.