People, Events and Ideas—in the Age of Trump

People, Events and Ideas—in the Age of Trump

A concept attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt said (paraphrasing):  “small minds think about people; average minds think about events; and great minds think about ideas”.

Watching America’s political convulsions in 2017, it seems as if the unusually ‘large’ personality that is Donald Trump is dragging America’s and the world’s great minds down to the level of thinking and talking about people—or, more precisely, about Trump.  Because at the level of ideas, the thrust of Trump’s agenda and his appointments and executive orders is mostly aligned with the founding spirit of America.  Which is to say, it’s mostly good.

No one with a clue about the actual teachings and life example of Mohammed could fail to grasp the extreme misfit of Islam with Judeo-Christian America.  Sharia and the Bill of Rights are opposites; there is no middle ground between them.

And so the idea of implementing a more serious level of vetting of immigrants and refugees from Islamic countries—particularly those countries known to harbor and facilitate Islamic terrorism—to be sure that they are here to embrace freedom and the US Constitution is straightforward American common sense that benefits every citizen of this country.  It isn’t even remotely controversial, much less illegal.

Yet, TRUMP!%&#!—makes it controversial, and leftist feminists and the leftist LGBT community line up to condemn Trump and stand up for a form of ideology and religious teaching that subjugates women and authorizes the killing of homosexuals.  Go figure.

Similarly, Trump’s rescission of Obama’s transgender bathroom directive did nothing more than get the federal government out of a top-down dictatorship style of addressing the issue, and return it to the states and localities to deal with it as they see fit.  Trump’s action didn’t condemn transgendered people (his order even retains anti-bullying directives), and did not purport to tell states that they should forbid transgendered bathrooms.  It simply restored the Constitutional structure for dealing with these kinds of issues.

Again, the ideas behind Trump’s action are right; they are American, in the sense of restoring law-making to its right location relative to the Constitution; and they are not even remotely hateful or ‘transphobic’.

Yet, TRUMP!%&@! did it, so Americans can’t talk about the ideas, but can only talk about Trump–and then entertain the false narrative of hatred toward transgendered people.

Here’s hoping America’s great minds can wake up to recognize how they are being dragged down to an unproductive and small-minded level, and restore political discourse to a more serious level, closer to the realm of ideas.

Paul Gable