‘Deconstructing’ America may be harmful to your health

Most of us don’t know when we’re going to die, the obvious exceptions being assisted suicide or just plain killing ourselves.

If we did know, it would make financial planning so much easier. “This is how much money I have and I’m going to live this many years, so dividing the money by the years, I can afford to spend this much money every year.” See what I mean?

I’m 67 years old right now. My father lived to be 71, and most of his siblings lived similar life spans. My mother, on the other hand, died at 82, and her family all lived well into old age. Her mother was 88 and her brother died at 99 and missed by a few weeks making it to 100. So I don’t know where I’m likely to fall on the family death scale.

Not only do we not know when we’re going to die, we don’t know how. A lot of people get cancer, sadly, and I did smoke for 50 years before quitting, so there’s that possibility. So far, so good on that one, however. Others die suddenly in traffic accidents or shootings or simply drop dead of heart attacks that seemingly come out of the blue.

So we’ve established that we can die at any time of a variety of causes, but we already knew that. What we didn’t know until recently was that we would elect an alternative president who would appoint a Cabinet of Deplorables that would tear down and discard all of the rules that were put in place to help us live longer and safer lives.

I don’t know about you, but if I died of cancer because I smoked too much for most of my life, I’d consider myself responsible for my own demise. However, if I died drinking water that was contaminated because coal companies were allowed to dump toxic debris into it, I’d be looking around for someone else to blame.

If a tree got struck by lightning and fell on my head, I’d call that fate and figure it was just my time to go. If a tree fell because global climate change caused years of severe drought and the tree just dried up and toppled over, Donald Trump and the climate science deniers would be hearing from my attorney.

If my wife or I contracted an incurable disease, and no one would be able to cure us, then we would die. However, if either of us contracted a treatable disease but we couldn’t get treatment because the government took away our health insurance, then our blood would be on somebody else’s hands.

And if a meteor broke loose from the Milky Way and crashed into my house, there’d be nothing I could do, but if the madman we put in the White House started a war with somebody and a nuclear warhead blew me apart, I’d be severely pissed off.

See where I’m going with this?

Steve Bannon, the Alt-POTUS’s anti-Semitic, Lenin-loving, white supremacist strategic advisor, is on a mission to “deconstruct the administrative state” of America as we know it. That sounds like total nutbag bullshit until you realize he’s actually talking about dismantling our system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts because they “infringe upon U.S. sovereignty.”

To carry out this mission, the White House has appointed:

* An EPA director who likes suing the EPA,

* An education secretary who hates public education,

* A HUD director who opposes fair housing rules,

* An energy secretary who wants to abolish the Department of Energy and

* An attorney general who opposes civil rights.

I could go on. There’s more…but the message is clear. Our lives are being put in danger by our own government and the narcissistic sociopath we put in charge of running it. After they throw out all of the regulations we could find ourselves eating tainted food and drinking tainted water inside our substandard housing while breathing toxic air outside and getting sick with no health care options or maybe even getting arrested because of our race, color, religion or creed and locked away for a very long time.

We still don’t know when or how we’re going to die, but the list of causes seems to be getting a whole lot longer under our current administration. Is that really what 62 million people voted for?

They used to say your chances of something really bad happening [fill in your own disaster] were less than your chance of being struck by lightning. I’m not sure that’s true any longer. If given a choice between dying painfully and slowly from some water-borne disease caused by government neglect or being struck by that lightning bolt, I think I’d go out and play in the rain.

I admit I don’t know what a “deconstructed” America would look like, but it’s not something I want to try, so if we can’t find enough rational, patriotic and clear-headed members of Congress to stop this crazy train before it completely jumps the tracks, I will volunteer to be deported.

I don’t know for sure what life is like in Ireland, but I’d rather die there of natural causes than be murdered in America by the foot soldiers of Donald Trump.