Once upon a time there was a little boy named Donnie . . .

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Donald John Trump.

He lived with his mother, father, two brothers, and two sisters in a large house in Jamaica Estates in the Borough of Queens in New York City, a house that was graced with four white columns and twenty-three rooms. It was a status symbol for elegant living with a housekeeper, a cook, a chauffeur, and even an intercom system.

A child who was four years younger than Donald was once left in a playpen in a back yard adjoining that of the Trump family, and the younger boy’s mother returned to find Donald throwing rocks at the little boy. Trump was using the playpen for target practice. He showed no remorse.

Donald was a child who never took “no” for an answer. When he was a second-grader he gave his music teacher a black eye because Trump “didn’t think he knew anything about music.” He was nearly expelled.

His nicknames around the neighborhood were “Donny,” “The Trumpet,” and “Flat Top” (for his hair). “In his neighborhood, Donald and his friends were known to ride their bikes and ‘shout and curse very loudly,’ said Steve Nachtigall, who lived nearby. Nachtigall said he once saw them jump off their bikes and beat up another boy.”

One of Trump’s schoolmates recalls that, “When that kid was 10, even then he was a little s---.”

The Child is Father to the Man. Many people would currently characterize big Donnie as a big s---.

Young Donald “commanded attention with his playground taunts, classroom disruptions and distinctive countenance, [and] even then his lips pursed in a way that would inspire future mimics.” Oh Donald, we hardly knew ye.

He has said he hasn’t changed since the first grade. (That’s when he was age six.)

For example, little Donnie refused to acknowledge mistakes, even one so trivial as misidentifying a popular professional wrestler.

His seventh-grade teacher remembers Trump as follows: “He was headstrong and determined. He would sit with his arms folded with this look on his face—I use the word surly—almost daring you to say one thing or another that wouldn’t settle with him.”

When he was sent off to military school at age thirteen—in effect banished from the family home because he was nearly out of control—he tried to push a fellow cadet out a second-floor window during a fight, but was stopped when two other students intervened.

“To his [military school] classmates, Trump was a blend of friendly and cocky. He boasted that his father’s wealth doubled every time he completed a real estate deal.”

Trump is being ridiculed around the world, not just in the U.S. by Alex Baldwin on Saturday Night Live (resulting in repeated Tweets by Trump to denigrate the actor). And the ridicule went global some time ago, with a variety of comedians in fright wigs pontificating in a number of other countries, one of whom is hawking “Trump Finger Tampons.”

Political cartoonists are having a field day.

Since the election it has been revealed that Trump paid nearly $12.5 million to his own businesses and family members during his eighteen-month campaign for president, as indicated in mandatory campaign spending reports. These payments, especially $8.7 million to Tag-Air Inc. to operate his airlines, are apparently legal.

We flock to Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City to protest, carry signs, and remind Donald that he is Not Our President. I doubt Trump reads these signs.

He stays up late devising new and surprising messages by using his Samsung cell phone on that most presidential of media, Twitter. (He has failed to hold a news conference for about six months and rarely sits for actual media interviews that record his responses audibly and even visually, including his body language.) This less than august mode of one-person communicating without feedback by a president-elect also brashly and snidely attempts to upstage the actual current occupant of the Oval Office, one President Barack Obama.

Trump was named Person of the Year by Time Magazine, or “President of the Divided States of America.” In the cover Trump poses in a raggedy upholstered chair with a sinister glare over his shoulder (the once stylish chair, like the marble and gold of Trump Tower, represents decadence morphing into disrepute). “For reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s, Donald Trump is TIME’s 2016 Person of the Year.” Nancy Gibbs, “The Choice.” Trump appeared to believe this was an honor.

Trump has spent his life concentrating on Himself, and believes that the world will be enthralled with his comments on such topics as:

— The Donald J. Trump Foundation’s demise at the hands of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (for making distributions for non-charitable reasons using other people’s money);

— Trump’s characterization of the United Nations as a “club for people to have a good time” even as the U.N. has been considering the legality of new construction of Israeli West Bank settlements and other countries have condemned this conduct;

— Trump’s assessment of his impact on the mood and financial status of the global economy: “The world was gloomy before I won—there was no hope. And now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!”

— Trump’s exaggerated excuse for his pitiful performance at the three televised debates with Hillary Clinton: “Are we talking about the same cyber attack where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?”

— Trump’s boasting whoppers about his November victory: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

The poet James Whitcomb Riley once wrote:

“Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,

“An’ wash the cups and saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,

“An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,

“An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;

“An’ all us other children, when the supper things is done,

‘We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun

“A-list’nin to the witch-tales ’at Annie tells about,

“An’ the Gobble-uns ’at gits you

            “Ef you

                        “Don’t

                                    “Watch

                                                “Out!

“Onc’t they was a little boy would n’t say his pray’rs—

“An’ when he went to bed at night, away up stairs,

“His mamy heerd him holler, an’ his daddy heerd him bawl,

“An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he was n’t there at all!

“An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press,

“An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ every’wheres, I guess;

“But all they ever found was thist his pants an’ roundabout!

“An’ the Gobble-uns ’ll git you

            “Ef you

                        “Don’t

                                    “Watch

                                                “Out!”

A fitting end for Little Donnie?

Donald Trump Triumphs as The Lady Weeps

Lady Liberty is weeping today as the 240-year-old grand experiment with democratic greatness that is the United States of America has crashed and burned in the person of a foul-mouthed con artist who will now have the power to steer the ship of state.

“What can they have been thinking?” we all ask each other of the voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump. “Don’t they know what will happen next?” “Don’t they have any sense of history?” Jackboots persistently march through our memories and we cringe.

Alas, too many Americans do not understand the ramifications of voting a narcissistic megalomaniac into the highest office, the Presidency, but somehow think they have “won.”

No, Trump voters, we have all lost. Your minions in particular.

Bigly.

Trump will do nothing to help his struggling white male voters regain their sense of worth and their value in the marketplace. But they won’t learn this until it is much too late.

And The Donald cemented his victory with—what else?—a tweet:

“Such a beautiful and important evening! The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before.”

No, Donald, we will not all come together as never before. You have torn us asunder as never before. You have conquered the country, and the world is horrified at the wreckage you have left in your wake. Your campaign was modeled on the Red-baiting consigliere Roy Cohn approach to problem-solving: “Asked about Mr. Cohn in 1980, Mr. Trump was blunt in his assessment: ‘He’s been vicious to others in his protection of me.’”

Stephen King succinctly summed up the results: “No more book recommendations, politics, or amusing dog pictures for the immediate future. I'm shutting down.”

And Trump supporter and former Imperial Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan David Duke messaged: “GOD BLESS WIKILEAKS.” If Leaker-in-Chief Julian Assange was previously thought by some to be disloyal, he is now reviled by a substantial number of people for his—and his Russian confederates’—malicious interference in the American election. Assange is nothing less than a traitor.

And let us not forget the pinpoint precision of James B. Comey, disgraced Director of the FBI, who brushed off stern warnings from the Department of Justice to keep his mouth shut and instead tilted the playing field for Trump with breathtaking audacity when he made his late-October announcement about yet more phony Clinton email misconduct.

My mother, who died five years ago at the age of 92, was the child of Eastern European immigrants, a young pre-war bride when she first voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She married in haste so that my father would not be eligible for the new military draft that was imposed more than a year prior to Pearl Harbor—and he ultimately served in the Navy with distinction. She lived through the Second World War with its courage and self-sacrifice, the sinister McCarthy years, the stultifyingly boring post-war Fifties with their coercive uniform codes of conduct, the upheavals and reforms of the Sixties, the dawn of the electronic era, into the new millennium, and the election of the first black president with all that followed in the wake of these developments.

She welcomed that new millennium, never afraid to go forward. She always voted Democratic and eventually convinced my father to do the same. She tried not to follow the herd but taught me and my siblings to think for ourselves. In her own quiet, nonadversarial way she announced that she alone would decide what manner of living was moral and ethical and right—and what was most decidedly not.

In her selfless, understated style she personified the Lady with the Lamp. No Trump herd could ever have swayed her. No chants of “lock her up” would ever have turned her against the public servant we thought would be the first woman elected president. She would never have permitted such careless disregard for the truth to have changed her mind. She knew the power of lies that, when repeated enough times, accumulate gravity and power. She would have railed against those vile lies that misrepresented the conduct of the only qualified nominee for President in November 2016, Hillary Clinton.

My mother would have been appalled by the very idea of a Donald Trump in the White House, horrified, incredulous, speechless.

I am glad she never lived to see this day. It would have prostrated her with grief.

As many of us in these United States are this morning.

My mother was a teacher, and she knew the power of persuasion for good and for evil. This year in America, evil has triumphed.

God save the Republic.

Living While Female in Donald Trump’s America

It is time to blow up fantasies about what it is like to go through life in female form in Donald Trump’s America.

It isn’t sexy.

It isn’t fun.

It isn’t easy.

And it often isn’t safe.

I am now a woman in her senior years, and I think back on the incidents in my life, my fairly ordinary middle-class life lived in three different states, and how they have helped formed my consciousness as a woman.

To travel back down the memory lane of sexism and rape culture, I recall the following:

When I was eleven, a close male relative shared a bedroom with me one night when a family house guest was given my bedroom. My thirteen-year-old relative stripped me in my bed, groped me all over, and tried to persuade me to do the same for him. I was afraid to protest, but I refused to reciprocate and, mercifully, he then hesitated and left me alone for the rest of the night. Decades later I recalled the repressed event and told a female relative, whose response was, “You must have been playing doctor.” Nope, no way, no how.

When I was about eleven I was called over to a vehicle parked on the street next to my family’s suburban residence. The middle-aged male driver asked me if I wanted to see “something funny,” and he removed a newspaper from his erect penis which was propped up on the steering wheel. Thoroughly frightened, I ran back to the house and told my father, who called the police, but the man had driven off by the time they arrived.

When I was sixteen my then-boyfriend put his hands into my panties and tried clumsily to arouse me. I was a virgin. He said his buddies had consulted together and recommended this plan of action. He was not embarrassed to make this confession. He became a rabbi.

When I was seventeen I was on a class trip to New York City, and in the subway a man started rubbing his erect penis against my body in a crowded train. An astute female classmate understood what was happening and pulled me away from the attacker. I was bewildered.

When I was eighteen I was “pinned” to a fellow college student who was nuts about me. His fraternity brother, who had wanted to date me, spread the rumor that I was “putting out” for my boyfriend. I was still a virgin.

When I was twenty-one and temporarily substitute teaching in New York City in a Lower East Side junior high school, a group of teen-age boys began to surround me in my classroom after school was dismissed for the day. As they backed me into a corner and I feared the worst, another teacher entered my classroom and the boys scattered. I was close to tears and limp with relief. I didn’t teach again for seventeen years.

When I was about twenty-six and still living in New York City, I was ascending the stairs to an elevated subway when three adolescent boys slid down the banister next to me, the first groping my thighs and crotch under my skirt, the second watching with curiosity, and the third ducking as I raised my umbrella in fury.

When I was twenty-eight and temporarily living with an actor—who was also a special FBI agent—in an island summer getaway, he was especially obnoxious to me. So I slapped him. In response he punched me in the face, and I saw stars. The. Only. Time. Ever.

When I was twenty-nine or thirty and walking home from law school classes along an urban park next to a busy multilane roadway at sunset, I was stalked by four adolescent males, who were gaining on me as we approached the entrance to the dense grassy park. I ran out into four lanes of rush-hour traffic—barely escaping being run over—to dodge my pursuers. I have no doubt that otherwise I would have been gang-raped. When I reached a nearby sidewalk I told another woman what was occurring, and she grabbed my arm, turned me 180 degrees, and fast-walked me to safety.

When I was about thirty-two and appearing in a lower state court on behalf of a litigant, the sitting judge asked me sarcastically in open court if I were “a Miss, a Mrs, or a Msssss or whatever.”

When I was about thirty-five and eating lunch at a local bar and grill during a break from court, a married lawyer who had previously made several passes at me—which I had ignored—finally asked loudly from the other end of the bar, “Are you a lesbian or what?”

When I was thirty-seven and representing a group of investors and entrepreneurs who were seeking issuance of an FCC license to operate an FM radio station, and had been able to ascertain and notify the FCC that a competing group had failed to disclose the identity of all its board members (whom I listed), I received an anonymous telephone call from a man who threatened, “I will kill you, bitch.”

When I was forty-five and handling a real estate closing on behalf of the sellers, the attorney for the buyers, who had already cursed at me over the telephone prior to the closing, came over to me in the presence of two other male attorneys, the buyers, the sellers, and two realtors and called me, twice, sotto voce, a “fucking cunt.”

When I was about forty-seven and trying to resolve a divorce case on behalf of a wife regarding custody without a lengthy trial that neither party could afford, I went to the probate court records archive, the only private space available during a break in the proceedings, to try to work out a compromise with opposing counsel—an older married man who was at least six feet tall. He backed me up against a concrete wall, inches away. “Leonard,” I protested without missing a beat, “you’re in my personal space.” And Leonard slowly moved back as I resumed talking about the case.

As I continued to represent the same wife in her divorce proceedings, her estranged husband on two occasions came to my combined residence and office, after dark, when the lights were on in my house, and vandalized the professional shingle attached to a post in the front yard. This same man was later tried and convicted on child rape charges, fled the state, and was arrested and imprisoned in another jurisdiction after a shootout with law enforcement. He had been a suspect in the unsolved disappearance and presumed murder of a young woman in the original state some years previously.

When I was about fifty and participating in the taking of a witness deposition in a matrimonial matter, opposing male counsel began cursing at me on the record, and the deposition was continued to another date.

When I was fifty-one and representing a wife in a divorce proceeding, her estranged husband sent an anonymous note to about fifty attorneys who practiced in my community which featured a drawing of a witch on a broomstick and recited that it was in my “honor” for my “dedication to legal ethics, justice, truth, brevity, courtesy to all, and fair play.” It further stated that “If Assholes Could Fly, [my address] Would be an Airport!”

When I was about fifty-five and living and working in New York City, I was on a packed commuter subway when a young man got on next to me. Within seconds after the doors closed he began rubbing against me with an erect penis. I drew back a fraction of an inch and gasped, unable to move away from him in the crowded car. He then ceased, and at the next stop, before I had the presence of mind to alert anyone else on the train, he ran off.

When I was about sixty and traveling on a New York City subway, a man began openly masturbating a few feet away. Others have done this on numerous subsequent occasions although they generally attempt to mask their actions under jackets or other clothing.

When I was in my sixties on another New York City subway, three or four pubescent boys began harassing and threatening me verbally until an older man about my age shamed the boys by scolding them that they wouldn’t like it if someone treated their mothers like they were treating me. The boys reluctantly quit their campaign.

And these memories are only the ones I can clearly recall. Others flit by in fragments.

Life in America among the boys. The ones who never grow up.

Reflections on a Potential Trump Presidency

I have been trying to write about a variety of matters in recent weeks but, alas, am fixated on the ramifications of a potential Donald Trump presidency.

The man is insidious. He is an abomination. He gets under my skin.

To prevent my thoughts from being tarnished by what may happen at the so-called first presidential debate of 2016 scheduled for this evening, I decided to publish them in advance of that potential debacle.

I have been hounded for months by a sense of unease that a vulgar, ignorant reality television star may be elected my president. Psychologists who have been polling their patients report that most of them have been similarly obsessed and depressed with the possibility of a Trump presidential triumph.

In fact, as one columnist has astutely observed, the nation is having a Trump-induced nervous breakdown. Free-floating anxiety is everywhere. The sooner the election is over, the sooner we can begin processing either the end of the Trump candidacy or the hideous ramifications of a Trump presidency.

I have considered emigrating to Nova Scotia if the worst occurs. Political campaigns in Canada don’t last nearly two years. Canadian politicians are less offensive and even stellar. The winters would be cold and breezy, but the summers would be exceptionally pleasant. Beaches are abundant. And if I were to commit to working again rather than merely enjoying my retirement, I might be eligible for a gift of free land.

Of course, I would miss the United States in which I have spent my life, and could never again anticipate strolling across Central Park or grabbing an Italian meal in Little Italy during one of the religious festivals or watching the St. Patrick’s Day Parade swerve down Fifth Avenue or singing choral concerts in Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. These would be significant losses. The siren call of New York City is firmly embedded in my DNA.

What motivates a singular, terminally offensive outlier like The Donald? Many pundits believe he was always a selfish, narcissistic man who was covetous of the power and public spotlight inherent in the presidency, that he was too often close to that power and spotlight but never entitled to claim it in his personal business portfolio. Hence, envy plaguing a man who had been propelled to the public consciousness by a reality television show could easily have caused that man to covet still more power and glory.

Others recall President Obama’s withering public takedown of Trump during the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the evening when the “President took apart Donald Trump, plastic piece by orange part, and then refused to put him back together again.” Comedian Seth Myers added more fuel to the fire, after which the cameras lingered on Donald Trump as the astute ridicule cut through the venue and was broadcast to the public, showing a man unable to respond or leave, confined to silence, rooted at his table, and glowering with suppressed rage at his public humiliation.

According to Roxanne Roberts of The New York Times, who sat immediately next to Donald and Melania, the following theory du jour evolved: “Trump was so humiliated by the experience . . . that it triggered some deep, previously hidden yearning for revenge. That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature in the political world.”

This takedown occurred in the wake of Trump’s “birther” initiative, a racist, Islamophobic campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama’s birth and hence his presidency, a campaign without modern precedent, founded on a shrewd assessment of the inherent racism that had been surfacing from the Stygian depths throughout the country during Obama’s presidency, positing that the president was a practicing Muslim who had been born in Kenya and was hence ineligible to be president. That birther campaign continues to exist in spite of Trump’s recent efforts to lay it to rest via his startling and false allegation that it was initiated by Hillary Clinton.

Most people don’t think we’ve heard the last of birtherism, a malignant concept to undermine political campaigns when office seekers may not look, live, or sound like majority European-origin caucasian Americans. The barely suppressed racism that has propped up Republicans and their Tea Party compatriots for the past eight years has emerged via Trump’s campaign and other outlets in the form of full-blown bigotry unrestrained by any notions of fair play or even smart politics.

Some would argue that Trump’s birtherism campaign helped rouse his white supremacist troops, who have been out in force during the endless presidential political primaries and thereafter, when people of color, Muslims, the disabled, immigrants, and women have been targets of unrestrained fury, social media-inspired contempt, and threats of violence.

America’s ability to educate its citizens to think critically about a host of issues has been revealed to be a widespread failure, permitting a demagogue like Donald Trump to become the ascendant politician in a presidential race of unprecedented vacuous vitriol and insults. We older Americans like to believe we are immune from the ramblings of a Donald Trump, that only younger voters such as millennials are trapped in or convinced by the circular reasoning of an American Hitler on the campaign trail. But we would be wrong.

Too many voters of all ages have failed to assess the real dangers of Trump should he reach the Oval Office, and even admire his determination and continual bluster and roaring at one rally after another. When Trump yells to his listeners that he alone can “make America great again,” they are oblivious to the facts that Obama has guided the country back to prosperity following the Great Recession of 2008, killed Osama bin Laden during a time of terrorism, led this country with grace and dignity, and diligently addressed the hobgoblins of global warming and nuclear proliferation.

A saving grace is the civil and criminal lawsuits and official investigations now being directed against The Donald regarding Trump University, illegal payments from the Trump Foundation (of other people’s money), providing campaign contribution bribes to at least two attorneys general to persuade them not to join the Trump University litigation, and rape of a minor. No matter the results of the litigation and investigations, Trump will attempt to put his unique and dangerous spin on the outcomes. As for the 3,500 or so past court cases involving Trump casinos, rental tenants and condo owners, small business contractors, and racial discrimination, Trump is dismissive about his liability and secretive about the settlements he has imposed on many long-suffering litigants.

In the final analysis, what is really frightening, according to Garrison Keillor, is that “the biggest con job since the Trojan horse is taking place in our midst. Millions of Americans are planning to base their votes for a man who has lived his life contrary to all of their most cherished values. They are respectful, honest, generous, loyal, modest, church-going people with no Mafia connections and good credit records who try not to spout off about things they know nothing about.”

Further, continues Keillor, “[t]he man is a fraud, a tax cheat, a compulsive liar, a clueless playboy, and his presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for the country.”

And that is what keeps me up nights, immersed in a free-floating sea of anxiety, wondering just how stupid American voters are, how prone to accept at face value without more Trump’s narrative of a “crooked” Hillary Clinton, a woman of uncommon knowledge and experience who has been demonized in extremis. This Donald, this fascist candidate who boasts that he would leave the governing to his vice president and “do deals” to reduce the nation’s National Debt and punish members of NATO who failed to pay in full for American military commitments, whose knowledge of the Constitution is nonexistent, and whose commitment to the Free World extends only as far as his made-in-China lines of clothing and his business payments from Russian oligarchs, may be about to take the reins of government.

Which is why I haven’t been able to sleep for months and am considering a move to Nova Scotia.

What Is Going On in America? “The End Is Coming!”

The country has erupted into warfare. Weeks before the contentious political presidential conventions are due to begin in Cleveland and Philadelphia and as the summer days heat up, police have murdered two black men without cause but with stunningly revealing video in incidents that turned deadly in Baton Rouge and Minnesota.

The first in Baton Rouge was the killing of Alton Sterling, a black father of five who was selling CDs outside a convenience store with the consent of the store’s owner and showed his licensed gun to a homeless man who had been annoying Sterling. The homeless man called police, who responded by shooting Sterling although he was not resisting nor attempting to use his weapon. The shooting was captured on at least two different video cameras including that of a bystander as two burly white officers wrestled Sterling to the ground and shot him several times.

The second murder of an innocent black man was the killing of Philando “Phil” Castile, a school lunchroom supervisor, in his car in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, following a traffic stop for a broken tail light (“which wasn’t broken”). His fiancée Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds live-streamed the aftermath of the shooting to Facebook from the passenger seat of the vehicle, demonstrating uncanny narrative sang-froid as Castile lay bloodied and dying on the driver’s seat next to her, with Reynolds’ frightened four-year-old daughter observing from the back seat. Castile had been reaching for his driver’s license after informing the officers who stopped him that he had a concealed carry permit and was armed. Notwithstanding this peaceable prelude, one of the white police officers who stopped Castile shot four times through the open window of his vehicle. Castile had no felony criminal record although he had accumulated a number of minor traffic violations.

In response, twelve Dallas police officers and two civilians were gunned down last night in an ambush and subsequent exchange of gunfire during a peaceful protest rally, five of the officers being shot dead by a “sniper” who was perched atop at least one “elevated position.” That assailant, Army reservist Micah Xavier Johnson—who had served a tour of duty in Afghanistan—is also dead, killed by a police robot bomb that was detonated near him by authorities after a three-hour standoff.

As that shooter had indicated to a Dallas police negotiator, ”The end is coming!”

When Johnson’s residence was searched, it was found to contain weapons, explosives, and a computer indicating that black power web sites had been consulted. Three other suspects who were present at the Dallas rally protesting violence by police were briefly taken into custody but were not charged.

Visions of the 1963 sniper murder by rifle of President John F. Kennedy—which made Dallas infamous—crowd into the consciousness of a generation that was stunned when JFK was gunned down during a motorcade on a bright sunny day in November.

But current events are both less momentous and significantly more troubling than an historic presidential assassination, and have morphed into open race warfare (following years of what black observers consider to be unheralded covert race warfare by mostly white police against African-Americans ranging from ubiquitous unwarranted police stops of unarmed men of color to outright police killings of African-American and Latino men).

The events have been unfolding against a backdrop of a jingoistic presidential campaign that has featured storm trooper-like rallies with all the trappings of a Nazi spectacle. And a major candidate, Donald Trump, who obscures and denies any similar motivations—although his words and actions flowing nightly from our television sets clearly indicate otherwise—has been screaming accusations and promises to his audience nightly as his face distorts in impotent fury. White power web sites inflame and are inflamed, and anyone with a sense of history cringes as brutal events unfold one after another.

“Black Lives Matter” chant protestors across the country, a cry that began in August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, when unarmed black 19-year-old Michael Brown was shot twelve times during a confrontation and killed by a white police officer, whom a subsequent grand jury failed to indict. Witnesses reported the young man holding up his hands or otherwise making various gestures with his hands, even pleading ”Don’t shoot!” which became a national rallying cry. A Missouri grand jury sifted through a variety of conflicting accounts before failing to conclude that the police officer was wholly without cause to fear for his life and defend himself.

The city of Ferguson was eventually found by a federal investigation to have become a catalyst for unwarranted police actions by the mostly white police force against the nearly all-black population. Weeks of demonstrations with looting, violence, and destruction of local businesses by arson followed the shooting and polarizing lack of grand jury indictment, accompanied by police responses that included the use of tear gas and rubber bullets. Confrontations between protesters and law enforcement officers continued for months following the Michael Brown shooting.

A subsequent federal investigative report described a city that “used its police and courts as moneymaking ventures, a place where officers stopped and handcuffed people without probable cause, hurled racial slurs, used stun guns without provocation, and treated anyone as suspicious merely for questioning police tactics” [Q&A “What Happened in Ferguson,” The New York Times]. The Ferguson police chief resigned soon after that report was issued. 

Other similar incidents involving the deaths of black men at the hands of white police officers have continued to occur in recent years all over the U.S. at an alarming rate, feeding into the very real sense of paranoia that has gripped the black community.

The world is asking, “What is going on in America?”