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A New Marshall Plan
The Need to Invest in America
In America, the year 2020 has been unusually fraught with danger and tension on multiple fronts: we went through the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump; a time of racial unrest based on numerous police killings of unarmed black people; the loss of great national heroes (John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg); the appointment of a highly conservative judge to the U.S. Supreme Court; a tanking economy; and, of course, the coronavirus pandemic that, to date, has killed about 220,000 of us.
On top of that, Pres. Trump has been running for reelection, basing his campaign on lies, projections, and hatred. He gained office in 2016 by conjuring up images of Mexicans coming over our border to do us harm (“murderers, rapists….”), immigrants from Muslim-majority countries seeking to continue jihad on American soil, misogynistic scripts from his own very troubled past and current dealings with women, homophobia, and generalized fear and/or resentment of everyone who wasn’t “one of us.”
Trump is not an intellectually-accomplished man. His talents, however, lie in showmanship and the sort of hucksterism to which far too many Americans have fallen prey. As a people, his base’s lack of critical thinking abilities has rendered it highly vulnerable to the blandishments of our Grifter-in-Chief, who conducts his campaign rallies…
