2020 is about to get real
The holidays and all the niceties of the season are behind us, tucked away in the garage with the brightly spangled decorations until next year when we will once again share the transient and largely hollow wishes for peace, love, and happiness.
It’s time to get back to normal, or as close to it as we are capable these days, and prepare for what could be one of the most tumultuous years in the nation’s history.
We’re plunging into 2020, and it’s all about to get real.
Barely have we dipped a toe into the new year when we learn of unapproved, unsanctioned aggression in the Middle East. This bad guy they took out — General Qassim Soleimani, who headed up Iran’s elite Quds Force — was killed in a drone strike Friday morning. The action took place under presidential order without the advice or consent of Congress. It was a reflexive action, not well thought, that will carry severe consequences in the near and long term and that will most certainly result in the loss of life and treasure as there will now be a much larger U.S. military presence required in Iran and Iraq.
The immediate impact was not good.
As news of the killing spread, the price of oil shot up, the DOW took a nosedive, the terrorist threat level was ratcheted up in America’s largest cities, and the president and his supporters took another hit in credibility for the strongman tactics. Americans in Iraq and Iran were told to go home. Even the oil field workers were evacuated.
The United States has long been involved with assassinations and “regime changes,” from Patrice Lumumba in the Congo to Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, Indonesian President Sukarno, Chilean President Salvador Allende, Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, and South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem. None of these removals did the U.S. much good, especially the 1963 targeting of Ngo, which led to furious escalation of the war by the inflamed Viet Cong. By comparison, the VC were choirboys when compared with the terrorists of the Middle East.
While this general was without question a bad actor, we also can’t help but wonder how genuine the president’s stated reasons for the killing are. Was it a real attempt to secure the Middle East, or was it carried out as a diversionary tactic to deflect attention from impeachment proceedings? It is reasonable to believe the latter. Plus, of course, it gave this petty little man of negligent intelligence the opportunity to exercise his itchy trigger finger.
Nevertheless, this killing and the threat of yet another war would in itself be enough of a cloud over the emerging year.
But wait, there’s more, as the late-night TV huckster would say.
The Iowa caucus is less than a month away, washing us onto the shore of the 2020 election.
The Democratic free-for-all will spill over into our daily conversation with the force of a tsunami. The story will be centered, again, on how much damage the Berniecrats will inflict on the Democratic Party or if they learned anything from the disaster their tantrums created in 2016. The Democratic Party has become a microcosm of the nation itself: a disheveled, angry, unfocused group of spoiled children with childish mentality. Will the party be able to dig out from beneath the rubble created by the splintering of its factions? At this point, it’s a tossup. The fear is that Democrats will be so exhausted from their familial dustup that by the time the big show comes to town they will have no energy remaining to confront the beast that threatens our Constitution and way of life.
There has been a lot of talk about the economy lately, but the fact is that all of that talk is a disreputable distortion of the numbers.
Yep, there sure are more people working now.
The reason isn’t some wizardry and manipulation of the economy. The reason is because there are simply more people alive now.
Jobs?
Yeah, there are jobs, but not the kind of jobs to sustain a family trying to make ends meet.
Once, the United States was a productive nation, busily building things from automobiles to televisions, which consumers not only wanted but needed.
That’s a thing of the past as the recession in manufacturing continues to sag. Whether it’s the slowdown of production of the Boeing 737 Max, the residue of a recent GM strike, or the stupidity of a trade war with China and the rest of the world, the economy is not sound despite propaganda to the contrary, and it could very well bite us in the ass this year.
The Institute for Supply Management index of production is the lowest it has been in 11 years and manufacturing jobs are down (marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-slumps-worsens-in-december-as-ism-index-falls-to-10-year-low-2020-01-03).
The old-schoolers lament the nuclear family days when a household could survive on a single income, allowing mama to stay home and tend the kids while papa went to work; when a car didn’t cost as much as a house did not that long ago; when a house was something affordable instead of a crapshoot. But nothing has been done to fix the problem. Instead, the administration and its minions are sticking to a philosophy of trickle-down economics that didn’t work for Ronald Reagan and is certainly not working for this administration.
And of course, there is the ongoing impeachment process.
The mojo here is pretty bad — terrifying, actually — when you look at the number of Republicans who have yet to examine one bit of evidence in a Senate hearing and are pushing for a Senate trial bereft of witnesses or testimony.
Of course, there are plenty among the unwashed masses who have yet to understand that, yes, the president has been impeached — that the decision now is whether to remove him from office, censure him, or acquit him. For those folks, may we offer a remedial high school civics class?
We have entered a season of uncertainty of which we see no end while our tolerance for angst, abuse, and anger continues to decline at rapid pace.
This is the United States, a place that was once thought of as a civilized nation where even when we faced adversary we maintained a certain calm and intelligence to work our way out of it with dignity and fairness.
Not now.
The U.S. has embarked, in these early days of 2020, on a wildly out-of-control rollercoaster ride that shows no evidence of ending any time soon.
Happy New Year?
Doubtful.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
How to submit an article, guest opinion piece, or letter to the editor to The Independent
Do you have something to say? Want your voice to be heard by thousands of readers? Send The Independent your letter to the editor or guest opinion piece. All submissions will be considered for publication by our editorial staff. If your letter or editorial is accepted, it will run on suindependent.com, and we’ll promote it through all of our social media channels. We may even decide to include it in our monthly print edition. Just follow our simple submission guidelines and make your voice heard:
—Submissions should be between 300 and 1,500 words.
—Submissions must be sent to editor@infowest.com as a .doc, .docx, .txt, or .rtf file.
—The subject line of the email containing your submission should read “Letter to the editor.”
—Attach your name to both the email and the document file (we don’t run anonymous letters).
—If you have a photo or image you’d like us to use and it’s in .jpg format, at least 1200 X 754 pixels large, and your intellectual property (you own the copyright), feel free to attach it as well, though we reserve the right to choose a different image.
—If you are on Twitter and would like a shout-out when your piece or letter is published, include that in your correspondence and we’ll give you a mention at the time of publication.
