Does history repeat itself? In essence, that was the question my wife posed to me this evening as we watched the television news reports of the federally-invoked separation of mothers and babies; the tent cities housing thousands of minor children; and the terror of parents who had sought refuge in this country from chaos and potentially certain death in their own countries only to find it worse here. Mothers, forcibly separated from their infants and toddlers who were shuttled away to be placed in facilities within which no one but designated federal agents were allowed to observe. Children sobbing as they were taken by armed military strangers to hidden interment facilities. Thus, my wife’s question, “Do you think in 1936, 1937, or 1938, as a middle-class husband and wife sat in their living room in Berlin, Germany and listened on the radio to the actions of the Nazi regime, they asked each other, ‘What is happening to our country?’” seemed justified. Are we truly experiencing history repeating itself?

 
An answer of “absolutely” becomes more and more accurate with the dawn of each day and the new series of ‘Trumpian Twitters’ that appear to now be the process of which we steer the political direction of our nation. Sadly, in the eyes of other nations we are now seen to applaud dictatorial authoritarianism where the leader replicates an infallible deity. We are noted to define ‘human rights’ as any action that benefits the wealthy Caucasian minority (who control 90% of the world’s wealth). We regularly find scapegoats in those groups of limited wealth and education without power to fight back, and we pride ourselves as Biblical scholars and interpreters, misusing scripture and evangelical Christians as our shield. In essence, we are a country in rapid decline; a country, if not wrought by revolution in the future, that will become subservient to countries that better interpret history, if there ever is such a country. As our current leader has so regularly tweeted…Sad!