MERCY ME?

 I ponder what was said by a trumpolater on television about how he thinks we need a dictatorship which will 'give us a good paddling'. I'd admire to ask that fool, who does he think needs paddling and why?
If he thinks big corporations who have all but entirely bought up our political process so they can become even more obscenely rich and never have to clean up the lethal pollution messes they love to make are the ones in need of chastisement, then the man's onto something real. But he's dangerously mistaken if he thinks Trump will ever paddle that lot; for that we need Bernie or one of his acolytes.
On the other hand, he might be brainwashed enough to want the 'Myrka of 1953 back again and nailed into place permanently. Well, we certainly should up the tax rates and union-belonging percentage of the working people to what they were back then. But we neither can nor should cement the social relations to what they were back then. I suspect that's really what that fool and his like yearn for!                                   

I wouldn't call myself a merciful man by nature. I also always ask myself, is it wise to extend mercy to those who will almost certainly see it as weakness and will break the peace as soon as they think they can get away with it? My hatred for bullies may well be pathological and my initial impulse is to wrench a horse-doctor's dose of their toxins down their own throats. But at least these days, somewhere in the middle of all that and probably Deo Gratias, I ask myself: What else have these poor lumps of mostly unbaked dough ever known but such brutality? And why am I reinforcing it?
Then the question becomes, what else can I, and others like me, do? One ugly fact of life which my fellow liberals and progressives have been, and may still be, reluctant to face (except, for some of them, when Jews appear to be 'bullies') is this: we need to insist on good order and everyone being given a chance to speak--and the flip side of this is no one, and no group, gets to crowd out anyone else--and that those norms need to be enforced, at times harshly so. We've been far too reluctant to do that. And we also need to show quite plainly the 'tinfoil' quality of the 'arguments' of those who are either maliciously self-interested or, to use one of my dad's expressions, don't know their a**es from holes in the ground!

Also, at the same time, we need to insist that part of the education of experts (if it isn't already) must be the ability, as Lord Rutherford said, to put their knowledge into language understandable to all, or as near to all as we can get. I suggest this is necessary to restore trust in experts.
Finally, if we are not to use worse brutality in reinforcing and expending democratic norms, we need to find other ways. Arguments are one; so too is asking questions of those who have either lost, or never really had, faith in democracy. We need to say, often and loudly, that God, Who is Love, is no bully, too many 'religious' leaders to the contrary. For one thing, doesn't God choose the smallest and ostensibly weakest to hear, speak and live His message on a seriously consistent basis? And for another, did not he who is named the Word made flesh agree to die like an uncommon criminal (the Romans employed crucifixion only for political and economic rebels or those who arguably spoke such rebellion) as part of drawing all of us to God?
We also need to say loudly that God favors the honest questioners and that those covens where questions are frowned upon at best cannot be where His Spirit is. And let's keep asking honest questions of those who have turned their backs on democracy. If they continue to insist on their own Great Importance, Dunning-Kruger style, let's remember something said by Martin Luther:
"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts or Scripture, is to jeer and flout at him, for he cannot bear scorn." 

 We need to keep our powder ready and dry even while we hope we'll only need some custard pies. Trump knows the power of ridicule; why else would he want to stomp anyone who tosses eggs, tomatoes OR custard pies at him? By this, perhaps more than anything else except his unceasing lying, he shows who he follows and to whom he leads his idolaters.
We need to repeat all this endlessly, possibly for years until the anti-democrats among us are (again?) a tiny, insignificant and powerless minority.