China Gets Tacit Okay To Move On Hong Kong From Trump

The political pressure cooker used by Trump to govern with has been breached and may not be repairable.  While the political strategy of dissent and grievance continues to simmer and be driven by Trump's governing style and campaign for reelection here at home underneath the cover of the unabated sear of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump's foreign policy negligence goes politically unchecked through via the distracted eye of the corporate media here at home and abroad.  In 1997 when the United Kingdom's lease on Hong Kong expired there was a "gentleman's agreement" between the still very much communist government of China and the provincial government of Hong Kong letting the city keep its unique status of a free market that thrived within the confines of a democratic political structure granted by an exceptional status that would transition over a period of fifty years to complete Chinese government control.  It is obvious by now that "gentlemen's agreement" has collapsed, along with the democratic government of Hong Kong as the government of China prepares to move in with its military to administer the political and cultural hand of oppression and suppression. 

Meanwhile Trump has given a Tacit okay to the Chinese government and Secretary Xi Jinping to go through with this move on Hong Kong as the White House walks a tight rope clinging to the prospects of a trade agreement still unresolved between the two countries.  What's going seemingly unnoticed is the continuing and ever expanding chasm between the United States and the western world politically and socially driven by the vacuum of an absentee leadership role by Trump as he turns his back on our European allies and the rest of the western hemisphere.  His "America First" policy, as Trump likes to call it, is by day proving to be economically and politically detrimental and expensive for our nation in its relations outside of our boarders as we turn inward and withdraw from a global community grasping for a leader pull us out of this global pandemic.

While we had a world leader and statesman do just that from the confines of a wheelchair at the outbreak of World War II with President Roosevelt we find ourselves with a President who won't even wear a medical mask in public as he politically flails about in an environment fraught with massive unemployment and unrest over how to handle the pandemic as it spreads across the country.  His lack of leadership at home and abroad is on the verge of undoing what over 150 yeas of healing in post Civil War America had made possible with the election of its first black President. 

We were only now beginning to form scars over the scabs that still existed from a war that nearly destroyed us from within.  The fact that Trump can almost undo all of that work in a short four years has only underlined how tenuous it has been over a century and a half.  If he gets four more years those scabs may turn out to be wounds that will not ever heal in the political environment we have now that makes us what we were to the world: a beacon of hope and unity.  

The Blue States vs. Red States Meme Used By Trump Is making Us A "House Divided Against Itself" That Cannot Stand

Red States vs. Blue States.  Blue States vs. Red states.  Though that national dichotomy was already here before the political arrival of one Donald J. Trump on the scene it was a political dynamic he would seize upon to use as an advantage at the expense of what we had built as a nation after 151 post Civil War years of pain, crisis, and incredibly hard work that remains to this day still unfinished.  He used it like a sledge hammer to divide and drive wedges in the electorate in an attempt to add just enough to his grievance filled devoted base to prevail in 2016.  Now we find ourselves dealing with an even more exacerbated political dichotomy he used the first time due to a global pandemic to engineer another four year term to continue with an agenda of division, strife and a plan to deconstruct our federalist system while he continues to settle political scores.

Now the idea that our country is defined as a confederation of blue and red states that must somehow link together in league with other politically like minded entities to overcome the other  because they aren’t the “right kind” of Americans is being used by Trump at the expense of enough consensus government to hold our federalist system together.  There is now no doubt we have reached a point where the reasons for today’s political dichotomy smacks of some of the same reasons used by the southern states beginning in 1860 to file articles of secession in their state legislatures as a preamble to the Civil War.  Trump is exacerbating these differences in ways many of us felt was unimaginable at this point in our history.

On a late and lazy summer Wednesday afternoon at 5:00 pm on June 16^th, 1858 in the Illinois state house Abraham Lincoln found himself standing before the State Republican convention as he started a speech that would rock the political electorate at its very core:

“….If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.  We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.  Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.  In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.  A house divided against itself cannot stand."  

Once he finished it would not only rocket him into the national spot light as a Presidential candidate for 1860, it would define what it meant to be a nation so fraught with a political crisis of division that it threatened to disintegrate beyond repair before our eyes if steps weren’t taken to bring it back together.  Of course we know what followed:  a Civil War that would kill 600,000 Americans by its end as a horribly tragic first step on the way to repairing what was.

We now find ourselves with a President who is not only trying to avoid that crisis of division but instead is relying on it as a road map to victory at the expense of the very fabric that makes us a beacon to the world.  Using the power of his office to punish those states that don’t align with his political goals is a dangerous precedent to use at this point in our history after such a long, hard road after 1865.

The founding fathers took great pains to make us a more unified entity after the failures of the Articles of Confederation that was leading to a division of states similar to what we are seeing today where one state is pitted against another at the expense of a national entity as opposed to a confederation of regions with their own ideas of political, social and economic policy.  Their idea was something called a Constitution that began with these words: 

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." 

“We the people” meaning we, as Americans are tasked with this call to make a more perfect union for one and all.  THIS one statement made us and defined who we are:  Americans.  It wasn’t perfect, as it took a Civil War to realize the true meaning of this sentiment.  But it was something we aspired to and was STILL working on until the present, what John F. Kennedy called, the “responsible officer of government” set out to destroy it.  Lincoln also once said, “……“the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present….we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”  The time to “think anew, and act anew” is here.  It’s a time worn adage that every general election for the President of the United States is always called the ‘most important election in our history.’  This time it isn’t just rhetoric, it’s real.  Real enough that any sane citizen can see the fabric of our nation is starting to come undone.  That’s how important the coming general election for 2020 is. 

If we don’t take steps to repair what Trump has done we will find ourselves where Lincoln found himself on that fateful trip from Springfield, Illinois to Washington, D.C. to prepare for his oath of office.  There is still time but here is precious little left.  If Trump finds his way to being the “responsible officer of government” again I’m not sure time won’t have run out.