From A Pre-Boomer to Zoomers: Let’s All Wake the Flock Up

TUCSON — We old guys grew up with a philosophizing possum named Pogo, a cartoon creature with an incisive worldview. He defined America’s woes with an immortal line: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That used to be funny.

Liz Cheney’s alarm — “we are sleepwalking into dictatorship” — ought to galvanize America. But that was obvious from Donald Trump’s first days in office. After all his megalomaniacal scheming, brazen lies and a violent attempted coup, too many people are still snoozing.

As one top-level FBI investigator recently warned, a second Trump term with neither checks nor balances would end the rule of law in the United States. By every indication, it would also dramatically shorten the time before Earth sloughs off us hapless humans.

“Having lost sight of our objectives,” Pogo wryly put it, “we redoubled our efforts.” Just look at all the self-serving scalawags and outright morons who feckless voters have put in office. Trump is only the worst. Even if he implodes, toxic trumplets remain to poison the body politic.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris stood together at Rosalynn Carter’s funeral. A single sharpshooter might have put House speaker Mike Johnson in the Oval Office, whose allegiance is to a narrow view of the New Testament, not the U.S. Constitution.

This hard look at dangers abroad is aimed at Americans not yet motivated to react, especially Zoomers, “Gen Z,” who will suffer the consequences. Pass it along to those you care about.

————

The irony defies belief.

Analysts on CNBC were giddy this week. The Dow topped 37,000, the first time ever. The backlash of Trump’s folly sent inflation soaring to 9 percent. It now approaches a targeted 2 percent, with full employment, brisk holiday spending and near-record travel abroad.

Despite a Republican stonewall, Biden is confronting climate collapse, rebuilding infrastructure, reducing poverty, protecting health care and doing what Trump promised but failed to do: put more technological and scientific innovation back in American hands.

Trump nearly undid NATO, and he signaled Vladimir Putin that a Ukraine invasion would be a walkover. Biden rallied European allies and blunted Putin’s onslaught by making public his intentions in advance.

Trump aided Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to subsume Palestinians into a single Jewish state. The West Bank seethed, and Hamas burst out of Gaza with despicable butchery. Biden presses Israel to moderate its overkill reaction and insists on peaceable coexistence with a separate Palestine.

Yet major polls say Biden trails Trump as his approval ratings sink lower. At this stage, polling is only a measure of madness. When the crunch comes, my bet — okay, my prayer — is that sanity will prevail. It all depends on how many eligible voters take an honest look at reality.

A massive voter turnout can restore an effective Congress, while emptying the trash in state and local governments. But the presidency will take a monumental effort.

Once in office, presidents are judged less by their successes than by unavoidable failures because of what their predecessor left behind. When an electorate tunes out the world, opponents can depict even spectacular feats of statecraft as shameful debacles.

And there is the cursed Electoral College. Biden skunked Trump by seven million votes in 2020. But he dislodged the most disgraceful president in U.S. history by only 45,000 popular ballots in Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona, purple states that now veer dangerously into red.

A Georgian debunks the ageism curse. Jimmy Carter, perhaps the smartest president ever, lost a second term for reasons Pogo could explain. But even back then, he championed the environment and human rights. At 99 in hospice care, he remains a wise global elder.

As it happens, I knew Wisconsin as it once was. I was born in Milwaukee to parents whose families fled Belarus and Ukraine, then laid low in the 1950s when a Washington miscreant named McCarthy went on a tear against suspected leftists, including a lot of European Jews.

Remember the heat Biden took over “malarkey”? He recalls the old days. Walt Kelly, Pogo’s creator, came up with a shotgun-wielding bobcat, Simple J. Malarkey, to mock Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist demagoguery.

In the end, a defense attorney brought his hearings to a close with an outraged retort: “Have you no sense of decency?” These days, in Wisconsin and beyond, that would elicit a laugh.

By then, we’d moved to Arizona but on trips back to Wisconsin I found most people so nice it made your teeth hurt. They followed world news in competing daily papers and radio stations. Democrats and Republicans hashed out policy to reach workable compromises.

A recent Washington Post piece profiled Arlando Monk, a black entrepreneur in Milwaukee who is registered to vote but may not bother. His attitude, like so many I’ve interviewed elsewhere, is captured in a single word: whatever.

Now 43, Monk went through school after the Reagan years when Republicans began targeting public schools to minimize civics, critical thinking and curiosity about the world. He is wavering between Biden and Trump.

He told the Post: “If it’s between them, I’m going to say this: Trump was hilarious. He was hilarious.” He didn’t say why; perhaps amusement merited a vote. He said Biden has not delivered the change he expected. “I would say,” he concluded, “it’s kind of up in the air.”

Apathy and ignorance resonate loudly in Arizona, the focal point of Trump’s hail-Mary attempt to finish the job of stamping out American democracy. He blames Biden for the crush at the Mexican border, yet again a crisis of his own making.

I grew up along that border and began covering it for the Arizona Daily Star in 1965. Since then, I’ve focused on migrants and asylum-seekers across the world. In brief, the Republicans’ fearmongering disinformation is flaming horseshit.

We can skip the part from 1540, when Spanish illegals first crossed into Indian territory, until 2017, when Trump insisted Mexico would pay for a wall to keep out “rapists and murders.” Start with his tool, Stephen Miller, and “Title 42,” which used Covid as an excuse to slam the doors.

Four years of refused visas, family separation and often inhumane treatment built up an enormous backlog. Trump did nothing to stem government repression, killer gangs and the impact of climate change in Central America. When Biden took over, people streamed north.

But mainly, it is a global scourge, a matter of push, not pull. Many millions are on the move, more each year. Some pay a price to try making it in often-hostile rich countries. Far more give up all they have, risking lives on treacherous odysseys to escape starvation, conflict or brutality.

Immigration control is vital to every country. Yet migrants and refugees are different. Postwar Geneva Conventions established the right to asylum for political or humanitarian reasons. Others need to satisfy authorities that they will contribute to society or the economy.

With millions of unfilled jobs, mostly menial, America badly needs foreign workers who pay taxes and obey laws to avoid expulsion. That only requires enough temporary housing at border crossings and magistrates to determine quickly who gets in and who doesn’t.

Biden has earmarked billions for that purpose. But Republicans insist that he also build more of a destructive, needless wall and restrict the asylum conditions that America championed in the 1940s. And this imperils a world edging close to unstoppable wars.

Republicans refuse to approve military aid to Ukraine, along with other vital foreign assistance, unless Biden accepts their terms on the southern border. European allies see a weakened America, scorned if not pitied. Far-right “illiberal” parties gain strength as a result.

While Ukrainians do the dying, the war so far has cost Americans $75 billion, a pittance compared to the $1.9 trillion tax cut Republicans gave themselves under Trump. Ninety percent of it is paid to U.S. companies and contractors. Europeans have contributed $110 billion.

Russia is on the ropes, spending 40 percent of its budget on its military. But Putin is dug in, waiting. If Trump wins, he is free to pursue imperialist dreams within the former Soviet Union, perhaps stumbling into a nuclear showdown with NATO countries — and therefore America.

Trump’s treachery was plain in 2017. With his go-for-the-gut jackal instincts, he saw Biden as his main threat. He blocked military aid to extort Volodymyr Zelensky for dirt to use against him. Finding nothing, he tasked Rudy Giuliani to slime Biden’s son.

A Republican Senate blocked Trump’s impeachment for a high crime of monumental impact. As a result, Putin laid plans to swallow Ukraine. Five years later, faithless House members hound Hunter Biden, the president’s only surviving son, using him as an excuse to impeach his father.

————

Ukraine is a clear point of principle. If borders are simply doormats that despots roll across at will, “world order” is over. Israel is far more complex. It hardly boils down to “Jews” and “Arabs.” Extreme reactions based on ignorant snap judgments lead to unthinkable possibilities.

This is the part that worries me most: a simplistic worldview. Among older generations, people often set in their ways are hard to budge from entrenched views. And young ones, with so much competing for attention, tend to lump nuance into generality the way computer algorithms do.

Fresh generations need seasoned reliable sources to see how the world has gone so wrong in the past. Such echo chambers as TikTok are hardly enough. Older ones need to understand a new reality in which artificial intelligence may soon be smarter than a lot of actual humans.

America’s bastions of democracy are paper thin. When insurrectionists stormed the Capitol howling for blood, imagine if the top general was not a Mark Milley but rather a Michael Flynn, who urged martial law while troops seized ballot boxes.

Trump tells us exactly who he is. Done with professionals and patriots, he wants stooges blinded by his light. He is the Orange Jesus who never forgets a slight, and if he returns to power vengeance is his.

He left no doubt at a New Hampshire rally: "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." That is, anyone who displeases him.

Stephen Miller talks of limiting immigration to white Christians. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, struck a $2 billion deal with the Saudi crown prince who had Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi dissolved in acid. He could be secretary of state.

New faces include Kash Patel, an inner-circle fascist who almost giddily boasts that he would prosecute journalists and news organizations that counter official truth.

Only 11 months remain to persuade the persuadable why Biden needs four more years, with a solid majority of lawmakers in Washington and state capitols. In 2028, a fresh batch of younger leaders can chart a fresh course suited to a different sort of world.

Painful as it was, I expected 9/11 in 2001 to be a wakeup call. Osama bin Laden and a small band of zealots scored a devastating hit. But the enemy turned out to be us. That outmoded electoral system had put the wrong man in charge.

The Supreme Court had brushed aside Florida ballot anomalies. Al Gore was bent on reversing climate change, and he favored diplomacy over confrontation. Instead, George W. Bush set fire to the Middle East, in large part to secure oil fields and double down on fossil fuel.

Gore is still at it, now excoriating that shameful U.N. summit in Dubai, chaired by the boss of a petroleum empire and overrun with industry lobbyists. The annual series of COP meetings has only kicked the oil can down the road since Trump reneged on the 2015 Paris accords.

That, in the end, is why energizing Zoomers is now so important. At the rate we are going, they may be the generation that has to switch out the lights on a planet that heedless humans failed to keep habitable. This is no time for sleepwalking.