Walled in: Time to quit playing to the chorus

Pain is relative. That’s what our country is learning from President Donald Trump’s shutdown of the government. As this craziness moves into its second month of seeing over 800,000 federal workers furloughed with no pay, many hundreds of thousands of federal contractors also idled with no payment and no chance to be reimbursed, certain employees forced to work critical jobs without pay coupled with the high anxiety of knowing that while they work for free that their personal bills keep piling up to the point of distraction, it should not be lost on any of us that all this could have been avoided.

All the president wants is a wall, and he has been willing to have the people he works for (that’s us) and who work for him (that’s the federal workers) pay the price. As a result, he has built a wall around the box he has put himself in as he struggles to find a way around or through a tough-minded speaker of the House.

It’s about now that the Trump chorus — which represents somewhere around 30 percent of the country — should be revving up its computers and smartphones to let me know how wrong and wrong-headed I am. Some messages make sense but most — not so much.

I am reminded of the time when I was just a young lad — I think it was 1958 — and polling was a relatively new industry. There was one poll that asked the respondents a simple question: Who is the president of the United States? I have never been able to forget the answer.

Fully 30 percent of Americans said that the president of the United States was Harry S. Truman. I will save you all the need to Google by reminding the baby boomers and sharing with the newer generations that in 1958, Dwight David Eisenhower had been the president since 1952!

What was a young boy to think? That 30 percent of America was stupid? Uninformed? Willfully ignorant? I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears, but there it was. How could so many people be so wrong all at the same time?

My point is simple: We have no good reason in 2019 to believe that we will ever get to that place where 30 percent of Americans will all of a sudden become knowledgeable. And it should not be lost on any of us that the Trump chorus — come hell or high water — hovers around 30 percent.

But, I digress. I was talking about pain being relative. As in none of Trump’s wealthy friends or relatives have a clue about the pain ordinary Americans are being forced to endure during a government shutdown. If you