Good Morning from Hell

Hell?

This doesn’t seem like Hell. There’s this long and beautiful marriage, two wonderful children and five grandchildren — all of them perfect. A church and a center for arts and sciences with friendships of many years. The pantry is full. The AC keeps me comfortable day and night. I have more doctors than I once had school teachers in high school. My church is involved in mission projects, a food pantry, assisting in a local elementary school, and help for people in need of financial assistance. And if I need, more likely just want, a new electronic toy, Amazon can have it on my doorstep tomorrow. Some of us are getting along quite well.

But something is amiss in our politics.

The president’s authoritarian character is not news anymore. I refer you to well documented reporting in established national media. The president, of course, denies anything that doesn’t glorify him and he decries “mainstream journalism” as creators and bearers of “fake news.”

But that’s just another tool in the authoritarian’s toolkit. 

I will also spare you the well-worn comparisons with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Those can be found anywhere except maybe in Fox media, controlled by the Rupert Murdock family, or the many informational hellholes you can read into on social media. 

However, if you discard these comparisons as illogical name-calling, I refer you to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a report on events in Germany in the 1930s by a CBS and UPI reporter, William L. Shirer. Adolph Hitler was Shirer’s subject with a tip of the journalist’s hat to Benito Mussolini and our ally in the European war against fascism, Joseph Stalin.

But I suspect Hitler did not consider either CBS or UPI to be a credible news source. 

Shirer’s book is one of those thick ones. You may not choose it for bedtime reading.  But if you do, follow it up with On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snider. That’s a short one and easy to read. Invest a few dollars and put it down beside your evening devotional guide. Read a chapter every night before you say your prayers. You will pray more fervently.

So forget about Trump for awhile if you can. Forget all about what many see as readily apparent indicators of an authoritarian future for the United States of America. Think, instead, about where we live now and where we have lived throughout the lives of most of us — Hell.

Really? How could one possibly call this Hell?

More tomorrow about the hell we live in and how it looks from the south of town.