The President of PTSD
by Tom Sullivan
The sitting president is going to give the entire country PTSD.
Every morning’s check of headlines brings another another punch to the gut. Yes, that is what his base wanted — for him do to their ideological opponents what they cannot. And to restore what they consider the natural order: them at the top of the social pecking order. Vicariously, if not in any real sense.
Hearing from veteran now: "The poor are the ones who fight and die in wars that never end, the rich have no stake." #PoorPeoplesCampaign— PoorPeoplesCampaign (@UniteThePoor) October 18, 2017
Your daily dose of outrage has been the business model of conservative talk radio for decades. Now it is the governing style of the Executive Branch.
Except what the sitting president’s base feeds on is toxic. Something the saner among us eschew for our own mental health. Now, short of going off the grid or retreating to monasteries, it is there every day.
"This movement is not about saving a political party, but about saving the soul of this nation!" –@RevDrBarber #PoorPeoplesCampaign— RepairersOfTheBreach (@BRepairers) October 18, 2017
Last night, the body of U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson arrived in Miami. Johnson died in an ambush with American Special Forces in Niger two weeks ago. As his widow and family were en route to meet the military transport, she finally received a call from the sitting president, Business Insider reports:
While speaking with Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, one of the four US Army Special Forces troops killed in action during a mission in the African country of Niger earlier this month, Trump said, “He knew what he signed up for … but when it happens, it hurts anyway,” according to Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson, who relayed the account of the conversation to the local ABC affiliate, WPLG.
Wilson heard the conversation over the speaker phone and told CNN’s Don Lemon:
“This is a young, young woman, who has two children, who is six months pregnant with a third child. She has just lost her husband. She was just told that he cannot have an open-casket funeral, which gives her all kinds of nightmares — how his body must look, how his face must look — and this is what the president of the United States says to her?”
Wilson wasn’t done:
“I asked them to give me the phone because I wanted to speak with him,” she said. “And I was going to curse him out. That was my reaction at that time. I was livid. But they would not give me the phone.”
That was not what I was hoping to write about this morning. In Binghamton, NY, the national Poor People’s Campaign continued last night. The Rev. Dr. William Barber II was just delivering a strong dose of truth:
"The marriage of Christian evangelicalism and white nationalism is heresy." @RevDrBarber #PoorPeoplesCampaign— PoorPeoplesCampaign (@UniteThePoor) October 18, 2017
If that wasn’t clear from last weekend’s Values Voters Summit, Barber put an exclamation point on it.
"He wants us to say Merry Christmas when his policies wouldn't even help the Mary, Jesus and Joseph of #Christmas." #PoorPeoplesCampaign— Kairos Center (@Kairos_Center) October 18, 2017
As someone on Twitter said, they’ve turned a cheery holiday greeting into an in-your-face curse.
"It's about cash, not Christ, greed, not grace. It's a con on the American psyche." @RevDrBarber #PoorPeoplesCampaign— PoorPeoplesCampaign (@UniteThePoor) October 18, 2017
White supremacists don’t care about white people #PoorPeoplesCampaign #UniteThePoor pic.twitter.com/LmxukwQMhf— Laurel Ashton (@laurela1020) October 18, 2017
The Poor People’s Campaign continues tomorrow night in Boston.
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