America's Looming Referendumb
WILD OLIVES, France — Sorting through notes after six months in America, I happened upon this typical Trump tweet: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” The man is semi-literate and impervious to truth.
In at least 35 countries, including Canada and Mexico, anyone born within their borders is a citizen. The United States alone was "STUPID" enough to give a corrupt, delusional, racist megalomaniac a second term to devastate so much of our imperiled planet.
As expected, Europeans pepper me with questions about America's wannabe god-king who so many laughed off at first but now view with seething contempt.
The problem, I think, is less stupidity than cupidity. A wealthy few manage to convince workaday families that soaring bills and hardships are not the president's fault. Too many Americans simply ignore real-world crises their leaders make steadily worse.
And although Trump's poll numbers plummet, he still has an ace in the hole, which he exploits with shameless blood libel: baseless fear of the off-white Other.
Rich countries need border controls as desperate families flee climate collapse and conflict. But America, with its wide-open spaces, depends heavily on fresh skills and scutwork labor. Slammed doors only shorten the fuse on a global human timebomb.
Ineffable poverty and simmering hatreds grow exponentially as Trump's fossil-fuel backers poison Earth's atmosphere. The millions he lets die because of slashed foreign aid leave behind survivors who swell the ranks of terrorist groups and criminal gangs.
Balloting in November will reveal whether enough Americans are ready to protect their own progeny from unbearable heat, rising polluted seas and freak violent storms as well as unstoppable military conflict and increasing demagogy.
It will be the most crucial election ever, anywhere, in a wider world badly in need of American wherewithal to confront common challenges. In a dis-United States, it will amount to a national referendumb.
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