Oops, wrong homonym. Be
careful Donald. America is great because America grates.
The dictionary defines the
word, grate, as
1- To reduce a substance to small pieces
2- To make a rasping sound
By his very presence he
has concentrated the national consciousness as a negative model by shredding the
culture of male dominance till it screeches with the toppling of predators.
It is certainly no
coincidence that the president’s female grabbing, revealed during his campaign,
has led to the fall of Harvey, Kevin, Louis et al along with Roy Moore. The
sound you are hearing is the crumbling of the patriarchy.
Credit Trump with this
single accomplishment…unintended as it is. A nation nominally led by such a vulgar,
narcissistic miscreant ignites an equal and opposite response. Call it revolution,
American style. It took a Donald to rouse us from our slumber.
Now if we could only
extend the outrage to his dismantling of government agencies, bellicose prattle
and abject ignorance of climatologists we could further demonstrate the
greatness of our democracy.
Sometimes it takes a
tragic misstep in history to make us see with clarity and redress the
grievance. The election in 2016 was one such event.
One hundred years earlier
an Irish rebellion was put down. The British executed leaders of the uprising.
Out of that tragic event William Butler Yeats wrote his poem, Easter 1916. The recurrent line in the
piece is, A terrible beauty is born. The
death of the revolutionaries had a reverse effect on the Irish people. The militants
became martyrs and the movement was reinvigorated.
So too, the Trump presidency
has seemingly consolidated the opposition. A
terrible beauty is born out of the
grating, the mass shootings, nuclear brinkmanship abroad, and threats to health
of our planet. It’s the only one we’ve got.
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