Last night I watched a two-hour CNN special entitled Trumping Democracy. It chronicled the attempts of Donald Trump to declare his defeat in the 2020 election a conspiratorial fraud by the Democrats. The only Members of Congress asked to participate in the program were some of the ten Republican House of Representative members who voted to impeach President Trump when that vote was passed shortly after the election. In addition, other officials who had served in the Trump administration who had resigned in protest over his post-election machinations also were interviewed.

Team sports of any kind, especially when there is an enormous crowd of partisan spectators, have the ability to bring disparate groups of people into the common enterprise of trying to cheer on their team to victory, or of letting them know that even in defeat their efforts are cherished by the fans. There is nothing else in human society, historically or contemporaneously, which magically unifies large gatherings of otherwise disunited humans as does team sports. There are no Republicans or Democrats, no management or workers, just fans.

The Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court allowed anyone to contribute any amount to any candidate on the spurious principle that it is an expression of free speech. It has turned our country into a kleptocracy that is controlled by a very small group of Americans with an incomprehensibly huge political war-chest to purchase whatever they desire in tax policy. A few billion dollars more for the IRS would result in megabillions more in tax revenue, and that plutocrats understandably abhor.

In this final essay in a series of four essays, I want to address a problem which has become painfully more acute in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With the undeniable increase in life expectancy, there are way too many old people in powerful elected or appointed positions in government or in government agencies or on corporate boards of directors. I make these observations as a readily certified old codger myself.

Throughout the developed world, there is a growing shortage of workers for all kinds of jobs, especially low-skill, low-paying, boring jobs. Now that the world economy at last is picking up after the pandemic, there are too few people applying for the jobs for which employers are seeking workers. Some of the explanations for this rare economic phenomenon come from the pandemic itself. After have been furloughed or laid off, many people have decided they liked not having to work for a few to several months, and they took early retirement. Others realized the jobs they had are not worth going back to, and so they quit. But why? Can they afford to retire early, or to live sufficiently comfortably that they can stop working? Apparently millions have given affirmative answers to both of those questions.

When Clarence Thomas became a justice during the administration of George H. W. Bush, Mr. Thomas told his law clerks when he began his tenure, “I ain’t evolving.” By that statement he wanted them to know he would not be like Justices Blackmun and Suter, also Republicans appointed by Republican presidents. He would remain a rock-ribbed conservative as long as he served as a member of the nation’s highest judicial body. He most certainly has remained true to his word.

Nearly all legislatures in nearly every nation on earth have too many plutocrats to enable Big Picture legislation to pass which benefits the middle and lower classes as much as the relatively small percentage of upper class citizens. However, in an evenly divided legislature, too many proletarians can stymie wise legislation for anyone, let alone for everyone. Radical conservatives and radical liberals are anathema to moderate legislation being enacted.

That nature of the backgrounds of those who serve in the legislative and executive branches of all levels of government has a powerful effect on the nature of decisions those legislators or executives make. Most people elected to office tend to be successful in whatever is their occupation or profession, and in addition, many of them tend to be wealthy.

An old aphorism declares that the wheels of justice grind slowly. With respect to the various legal investigations being made into the dealings and finaglings of our former president before, during, and after his term in office, but especially with respect to January 6, 2021, it will no doubt be many months or a few years before Mr. Trump is subpoenaed to appear in a courtroom.

Five minutes ago I just finished reading a guest editorial by Joseph Turow, a professor of media systems at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote an explanation of how, when anyone calls an 800 number about any product, the conversation may be recorded (for training purposes, don’t you know?). Then, by the marvels (malevolence?) of AI, Artificial Intelligence, the information of your specific type of personality is sold to advertisers, so that when you call another 800 number, their voice-recognition software will funnel you to the type of sales representative who is most capable to succeed at selling you whatever it is you are inquiring about. (You thought those long waits were because there were so many other calls ahead of you.)

Why are whites most opposed to teaching young people the history of slavery and racial attitudes in America, and Blacks are most in favor of doing so? Why are Hispanics and Asians more favorable than whites to divulging previous trends about race in America? Do whites have something to hide? Are there features of racial history in the USA which might display whites in a bad light?

The French were run out of Indochina because they were a major power fighting a much smaller but far more committed foe. That did not stop the Americans from launching a war against similarly highly dedicated soldiers who were fighting for their independence from the Western domination of their beleaguered fellow Vietnamese. In both those instances, the far stronger force lost to the smaller, less well equipped force. Why? It was because the Vietnamese were willing to fight to the death of every soldier, while the foreigners were doing everything they could to keep from being killed.

Millions of Americans of all ages and classes still have not been vaccinated for COVID-19. There have been numerous articles or opinion pieces in numerous reliable news media which have suggested why that is the case. Most of these suggestions cite the aversion the anti-vaxxers think or feel regarding the vaccines. But why are they opposed?

Three American billionaires have decided to enter the enterprise of traversing space. Elon Musk, is determined to put a colony of people on Mars at some point in the future. The two others, Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos of SpaceX, recently took passengers with them for a few exorbitant minutes into sub-orbital space.

Humans have far more power than nature to change the future of Earth for the better or the worse. Rapidly advancing climate change should convince us that currently we are killing the world far faster than nature can heal it. Mounds of scientific evidence illustrate that alarming fact. The problem is that humanity is not sufficiently alarmed to take the enormous and expensive measures necessary to halt the destruction of all life upon the planet. We have the power to make the Earth like the other seven (or eight) lifeless planets in our solar system, but we clearly lack the collective will to halt our inexorable selfish slide into annihilation.

By now it is alarmingly evident that the Republican Party has morphed into the Trumplican Party. The traditional Republican Party in all its historical manifestations is dead. It has been replaced with a cult of personality in obeisance to Donald J. Trump.

All of us engage in undeliberate thinking. However, too many of the fleeting thoughts of evangelicals about long-held doctrines, and especially about newly-held political positions, are damaging the Church of Jesus Christ and the American body politic.

Nearly every Democratically-inclined citizen and millions of Republicans will never understand why so many Republicans have remained so fanatically dedicated to one of the most divisive presidents in American history. Nothing is to be gained by obsessing over that mystery any longer. Instead, these mystified Americans need to accept the near-certainty that every able-bodied Trumplican will turn out on November 1, 2022. If they do not admit that likelihood, they shall lose the election, and Messrs. McConnell and McCarty will seize the reins of congressional power, thereby thwarting everything President Biden will attempt to do from 2022-2024.

As an optimistic pessimist, I am optimistic about nature, but I confess to being pessimistic about human nature. If there were no humans on Planet Earth, likely our orb would keep circling the sun until the sun burns itself out, and plants and animals would keep replenishing themselves in evolutionary fashion for as long as the Earth lasts. But because humans do exist, we have the capacity, and evidently the twisted inclination, fairly soon to kill our planet. And that’s where my incipient pessimism kicks in.

If the United States had remained only thirteen colonies-turned-states along the Eastern seaboard, we would still be essentially a bastion of Brits. As we evolved historically, though, we took possession of the entire southern half of North America. Therefore the Land of Opportunity became open to people from nearly two hundred nations throughout the world. The American Dream was launched, and it was naively assumed that the streets were paved with gold.