It’s time to wake up, and I don’t mean in the middle of the night

Dear Red America:

Wake the hell up!

It’s long past time to put down your Bibles and the Laura Ingraham books, turn off Hannity and Limbaugh, take a break from social media and go for a walk outside. Take a deep breath…while you still can. Listen to the birds…while we still have birds. And while you’re out there, think real hard about the country where we live. Try to take an objective look at where we are today, and tell me what you see.

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see a president who has the morals of a schoolyard bully, the attention span of a door knob and the brain of a dinosaur; a greedy Congress with the backbone of an amoeba; a cabinet full of rich white guys who pose with sheets of money and live the life of royalty, but can’t see all the way down to you and me from way up in their penthouse apartments; and a handful of mega-wealthy donors who demand that the party in power make them even wealthier or they’ll cut off the money tap.

Truthfully, none of those people really care if the rest of us live or die as long as they get what they want, and that includes the Red State “base” that put them all into power. Oh, they want to sell you promises for votes, alright, but they haven’t actually done anything for you this year and that’s a fact, and if you can’t see that, you’re either too stupid to know you’re stupid or else you’re just not looking.

In less than one year, the Trump administration that you helped put into office has taken steps to destroy your air and water, denied climate change, canceled your right to sue money managers who rip you off, eliminated your ability to be paid overtime in certain jobs, tried numerous times to take away your health insurance, taunted and threatened to eradicate a crazy Korean despot who controls nuclear weapons, authorized the killing of endangered animals, cleared the way for an oil pipeline that’s now leaking all over South Dakota, discussed opening our national parks to drilling rigs, weakened public education, pardoned a law-breaking sheriff, threatened your Medicare and Social Security and demonstrated to the rest of the world that we’ve become unstable, undisciplined and out of control.

And that’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure I could use the google to find many more examples of destructive actions taken by this president, who, by the way, has been found to tell an average of 5.5 lies every day of his presidency and would rather start fights with, well, anybody than actually govern the United States.

If that’s not enough for you, the current Congress – guided by your president – is trying to pass a tax reform bill that even Forbes magazine says will wreck the economy for decades to come. That’s Forbes the business publication, not Mother Jones, The New Republic or Rolling Stone.

Are you getting the message, Red America?

If not, here’s another one for you. Republicans in Alabama and across America are willing to send a sick, twisted, gun-toting, Bible-quoting pedophile to the U.S. Senate because he’ll vote for Trump’s agenda. This is a guy who was kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court twice for violating the law and was even banned from his neighborhood mall. Is that your idea of American family values?

I get it that social issues play a prominent role in the voting decisions of many in the Republican “base,” including Evangelicals and mega-church Christians, uneducated white people and other fringe branches of the party, but is it really worth forfeiting your own moral standards to support politicians who don’t have your best interests at heart? Besides, if these hot-button social issues are so important to you, I’ve got some simple suggestions that are far better than voting for pedophiles, sexual abusers, liars, swindlers and crooks:

* First off, if you oppose abortions, just don’t have one. It’s that easy.

* If you oppose gay marriage, don’t marry a gay.

* If you’re put off by transgenders, don’t change genders.

* If you want to pray in school, go ahead. Knock yourself out. No one is stopping you.

* If you want to stand for the national anthem, be my guest. I do, too.

* If you want to send your kids to Christian schools, please do. On your own dime, of course.

* And if you want to get an education and a good job, improve your lot in life, pay a reasonable amount of taxes, buy a home, have a couple of kids and live the American dream, don’t vote for people who want to take all that away from you and keep everything for themselves. They’ll promise you that wealth and success will trickle down to you from the top, but look back in history and see how many times that proved to be true. The number zero comes to mind.

A few paragraphs ago, I started to type the words “Red Haters” – meaning people who wear Trump’s red MAGA hats – but I was struck by the fact that it looks exactly like “Red Haters” – meaning red state people who hate. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

The holiday season starts this week and I’d like to get through it with visions of sugar plums dancing in my head…and not waking up at 4:30 in the morning wondering if Paul Ryan is going to take away my Medicare or Social Security, or whether Trump will finally provoke North Korea to shoot off its missiles, or whether Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski can find one more senator to defeat this insane tax bill that’s bouncing around in Washington.

So, Red America, please explain to me why 10 months of Donald Trump hasn’t caused you to finally wake up, because it certainly does that to me almost every night.