Making Bad Choices

 IF THE PRESIDENT od the United States can lose an election by a landslide, immediately, repeatedly and falsely claim, without any evidence to support it, that the election was stolen from him, then tell thousands of angry supporters to go to the Capitol and fight for him, and suffer no consequences when they invade, ransack, and seize control of the Capitol building while killing several people, then anybody in America can yell "fire!" in a crowded theater, and not be held responsible for the consequences when several people are trampled and killed in the ensuing stampede. Trump will not be convicted in his impeachment trial, only because republicans will claim, falsely, that the process in unconstitutional, and will avoid their duty to do justice. In fact,  it is constitutional, according to precedent.The similarities, psychologically, between Trump and his supporters and Hitler and his are alarmingly evident. A right wing extremist populist demagogue convinces his sycophantic angry supporters that he alone can lead them backward in time to some imaginary time when the country was truly great, far greater than now in its diminished condition.The homeland's problems,all of them, are caused by certain enemies of the state, foreign and domestic.The leader and his followers must confront and defeat these enemies. The enemies include certain types of foreigners, foreigners with the wrong religion, skin color, or language.Domestic enemies include the news media, liberals, socialists, minorities; they could be almost anyone.Racism and xenophobia underscore,in one subtle form or another, all the words, actions, and beliefs of the great leader and his followers. Their cause becomes their crusade, and their crusade their cause.What happens to the crusade and to those who pursue it when the leader has been vanquished by the opposition? History is the best solution, the final solution  Forever rolling into the future, society is given the opportunity to reflect upon and to appraise its past decisions and actions. We are given the opportunity to correct our past mistakes, rather than repeat them. Was it a mistake to elect and support a president who stole children from their parents, encouraged xenophobic nationalism, pursued an isolationist foreign policy, persistently lied to the American people, and falsely claimed that his reelection was stolen from him, inciting a riot which killed people? History will decide, for those of us who haven't already.