We're all stuck in the third act of Dr. Strangelove - but without the clever dialogue. This administration is literally "Hell bent" and America is just Buddy Holly on the Big Bopper's plane.
The only thing more dangerous than having someone stupid in charge of anything important is when that same stupid person goes nuts from the pressure. Our "Decider" has decided to send in more troops, in spite of the sweeping rebuke in both the House and the Senate. The demands of the American people are defiantly refused by our one single and primary employee. Instead of a decision, he's given us a conclusion. A conclusion of everything we used to rely on.
It's the Perfect Social Storm.
The President of these Untied States is drive-900-miles-in-a-diaper-level crazy. Incapable of pulling off Armageddon without screwing everything up, he has become the Barney Fife of Anti-Christs. "Bring on the Debacolypse! It's a Yee-Haad!" We never saw it coming. How could this happen? Every safeguard was in place. What are the odds that the man with the most power in the world would ever consider using it? Uh oh.
Power is way too - well, too powerful for us to use conscientiously. We have, to date, wielded it poorly upon our world. It invariably winds up crushing the one using it to crush others. Power has a defense mechanism built into it. If history has shown us anything at all, it is that long term failure from selfish use of power is virtually guaranteed.
From Alexander to Napoleon to Hitler to our All-Seeing-Chimp-On-Rollerskates, we have literally labored for countless generations under the misconception that power over others is something to strive for. Power is too a big toy for so adolescent a species. It becomes toxic, bloating our otherwise benevolent personalities into grotesque monsters.
Though absolute power may corrupt absolutely, the fuzzy grey-area of undue influence is not all that great either. The affliction of power strikes all of its abusers, big and small.
Why else would Alan, the middle manager at a copy center be prepared to leap to his death from the roof of his building because Mitch fed the paper in holes-backwards? An eight person office staff -- and a cop has to negotiate Alan back down off the ledge with a hand puppet. Another one takes the Power-Dive!
Maybe we just weren't designed to be in charge of too many others. Something goes wrong, like when we feed cattle to themselves. They go mad to weed their strain out of the gene pool. A single person was never supposed to dominate any mass of fellow humans. The leader very often goes mad. If they really think the people are all following obediently in lockstep, then that leader needs to be removed from the controls of anything other than a Nurse Buzzer.
It's been a very strange place to live these last few years. To the struggling American, just barely scraping by, power equals comfort. Comfort equals shelter from the problems of the rest of the world. A soothing egg, within which to retreat from the loud and annoying throng. Denial is craft for sure and to some it's even an art. Power can make us betray every survival instinct we were installed with. We will poison the air that we ourselves have to breathe, we'll throw our own young into a foreign Hell. We openly embrace humanity's worst enemies. We pay other humans to tell us what God is thinking.
What would possess us to do ourselves this cultural harm?
We love when life gets easier. Push a button and receive something, like a lab rat pawing a lever for another hit of sugar. Convenience and addiction are close cousins when being defended. A small amount of America's wealthiest place unreasonable burden on those with substantially less, to remain in their comfortable isolation.
Profit and power bring more sorrow than good. The only wealthy individuals spared this fate are the philanthropists. They share their fortune with others. The money they save on being able to sleep every night without the assistance of sleep aids more than compensates for the loss of any gains acquired by greed.
Massive accumulation of wealth can sometimes corrode the soul by the surrounding of oneself with the false power of everyone else in the room agreeing with everything that rolls out of your pie-hole, even if that's only what they're paid to do. This shift in motive removes the respect for others that the rest of us are forced into understanding, if only by living in the same world of our dwindling middle class.
Most of us have few options when it comes to demanding what we want in our daily grind. Instead, we know the value of compromise. Mediation gets results sooner than a fight would. Life is tough enough without making things worse on purpose.
The power of power can even make us lose track of the most valuable thing of all. That asset being us, each other. But when someone has enough money, they can hire people to take care of all the things that their friends would otherwise have wound up doing. Surrounded by employees, how could an individual become anything but suspicious? The more power, the more employees, the more suspicion. More, more, more.
Never has a cycle been more vicious.
Things just aren't set up so that the right person can even get a shot at power. Crooks have filled the halls of power to the brim and we all know that dishonest folks don't like honest folks around them. Good people give creeps the creeps. Corruption surrounds itself with it's own like to avoid standing out.
To be administered correctly, power shouldn't be treated like some perpetual carnival ride, but respected for the Herculean task that truly caring for others actually is. Until then things will look exactly like they do now. There's a glitch in the system. A fatal flaw that has undone every tyrant since the first.
The big problem with power is that it keeps going to someone who wants it, and that means that they're in it for what they can get rather than what they can give.