Trump- The Elected Tyrant

   In times of old, the ruler was king by birth alone. Now, we pride ourselves on our democracy- but can an election produce a tyrant? 

   This man (and now we pause to note the gender; another man rules, a woman was left behind) follows in the footsteps of a thousand killers before him. He says he will build a wall- he even calls it Great- like the Chinese did so long before, back when that tactic could still work. But he does not mean to keep out Mongols, or any army at all: no, this wall is to hold back the victims, to keep poverty away from our clean American soil. 

   But there is a place where even he knows a wall won't work. An airplane can fly over any wall. And so he writes a decree. An Executive Action. Execute. Kill. No more immigrants from here or here or here, he declares, without any real reason. Because he doesn't need reasons anymore. We are post-truth. This tyrannical king had dragged us into a world of alternative facts, where climate change isn't real because he says so, where statistics that disagree with him are lies. The realms he threatens are vast. The most obvious realm, that of these United States, will be affected, yes. But we have handed the world's biggest economy to an idiot, and that will ripple all across the entire world. And still the camera pans out, to the planets that NASA could explore, if its funding was not cut. And even then, the camera pans out, beyond the planets, to the logic and science behind them. The logic that he and his followers ignore, the science they despise. I pray to a god I don't think exists, I pray to an abstraction, that Trump is not the first of many. Because if this trend continues, if from here on out the Truth has no power in discourse, we are doomed. I hope that this is not the beginning of a story. Let us hope that this is but a blip on the path of history- a brief four years when, after looking at the glow the Enlightenment had given us for centuries, we squeezed our eyes shut. 

   I hope this isn't the beginning. But I fear it is.