Who Run Bartertown?

On a website I read now and again, I saw a story that asked if a certain thing was possible "in Trump's America." The author didn't really go on to say if this thing was possible or not; he just took  President Trump to task for calling members of a criminal gang "animals."

I'm a little leery of dehumanizing people via labeling them myself, but the thing about the article that sort of bugged me was the phrase "Trump's America." I see it a lot, and it's usually connected to an opinion that there's something wrong and it's the president's fault. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't; I'll leave that to other folks to decide and for still other folks to make a lot of hay over it. But I'll push back against this "Trump's America" thing, like I would against "Obama's America" or "Bush's America."

Because it's not. It's my America. It's all of those the article writers' America. It's our America, and all of the touch me not unclean spirit down-your-nosery they can summon from their righteous keyboards changes not a bit of that. England's government, technically, belongs to the Queen. She reigns there, which is why British warships are called Her Majesty's Ship So-and-So.

But in our government, we don't have a ruler. We have an employee. Sure, sometimes we make stupid hiring decisions, but that happens mostly because the two firms to which we outsourced the job search come back with some really awful candidates. Still, he doesn't own the country and it's silly to put his name on it.

One person secured a majority of electoral votes by convincing about a fifth of the country to vote for him. That's it, period. He didn't change everything; he can't. Because if he could, then the last guy could have too, but if he had, then this guy shouldn't have been able to get elected.

So stop whining about how it's "Trump's America" and start thinking about how it's your America just as much as his, and how you might go about convincing people what there is about it that needs fixing. You won't sound so above-it-all, but none of us are that much above it anyway.