The Terrible Waste of Trump's America

If he finishes his second term, Donald Trump will have been president for 2,920 days.If asked by someone in the future to summarize in a single word, the scope and scale of the collective injury we’ve sustained as a people and a nation during that time, the word I keep coming back to is waste.These 2,920 days will have simply been a terrible, unforgivable, unthinkable waste.A waste of time: the countless hours that so many people from every walk of life hadto spend trying to care for people, rebuild their communities, save lives, fight for justice, and do good work, all while facing their own president astheir greatest adversary.A waste of financial resources: adding trillions of dollars to our national debt, stratospheric corporate bailouts, a widening in the gap between survival and opulence, a brazen predatory economic assault on the poor and the sick.A waste of natural resources: a steady stream of environmental protectionrollbacks, wanton disregard for nature and planet and science, and an open contempt for the delicate web of all living things.A waste of energy: the emotional, physical, and mental drain on so many decent people who’ve spent their exhausting days and sleepless nights trying to reckon witha steadfast malevolence that defied reason and escaped comprehension.A waste of ideas: a systematic shutting down of diverse and qualified people: doctors, economists, educators, scientists, creators, and public servants, whose well-educated presence served as a threat to the eggshell ego and twitchy ignoranceof a historically insecure man-child.A waste of relationships: the violently uncivil wars waged by people for whom this single person became the hill they were ready to let their closest intimaciesdie on; the all-or-nothing tribalism he demanded, the fractures in families and friendships and neighborhoods that he either created or exacerbated, the cost of which is incalculable.A waste of human life: hundreds of thousands needlessly perishing in amismanaged pandemic; people without healthcare, overcome by financialand physical threat; children pulled from their parents at the border, refugees stranded at airports, transgender teenagers bullied to self-harm, victims of gun violence left without protection, and already vulnerable communities subjected to further violence.I try to imagine all we could have accomplished in those 2,920 days as a nation ifso many talented, compassionate, gifted, intelligent people hadn’t had to spendso much time trying to protect themselves from their own government:the art that could have been created,the medical advances that could have been made,the humanitarian work that could have been done,the habitats we could have protected,the species that could have been saved,the equity that might have been achieved—and that unfathomable loss grieves me.I try to imagine how different this place would have been if our leadership during these years had celebrated diverse humanity instead of assailing it, if they’dhave generated compassion and not had contempt for it;if they’d have wantedmore people to be seen, not less;if they’d have desired collaboration and not confrontation;if they’d have trafficked in hope and not in fear;if they’d have wanted an America defined by goodness and not “greatness.”But, since we have recklessly squandered this season of our story with this catastrophic collective error in judgment, the only option is to make sure that we never make it again by not being wasteful ourselves. We need to become an educated electorate again; a nation that takes its politics seriously, that becomes capable of substantive conversations, that is willing to abandon the shallows of incendiary sound bites for the depths of complex thought. We need to participate fully and responsibly in the democratic process again. Over the last decade, many Americans were so apathetic, uninformed, or plain lazy that they took their vote for granted, wielded it recklessly, or refused to use it altogether, which left us with minority rule with no regard for the will of the people.And most of all, we need to figure out how to talk to one another again, so that we do not allow another bottom-feeding, snake oil-selling carnival barker to so easily pull us apart with cheap culture war rhetoric, baseless stereotypes, and phony patriotism.By the end of this presidential term, we will have spent 2,920 days of 340 million people’s collective lives with this cruelty and ignorance and vitriol representing and defining us: with the severed ties and fractured families and polluted water and poisoned courts and perverted religion and elevated racism it has yielded.Those days irreparably damaged us in ways we cannot quantify.That is a tragedy that we will never truly recover from.The only greater shared transgression, the only more horrible sin, would be if we decided to waste a single day more.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. 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