"Now is the Winter of Our Discontent..."

"Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York."

King Richard (Richard III - Shakespeare, of course) starts his soliloquy with these two famous lines, and they - or at least the first line - have been floating through my brain these last few weeks.  Reading the second line gave me chills - and not from the cold.

These winter days seem to have been made up for me with reading, showing houses, some exercising when I can get out for showshoeing or Bob gets me skating, watching CNN and the other channels for politics, and encouraging friends who have run into health roadblocks.  Today a friend is in surgery for heart issues, another in the hospital with a broken (quickly replaced) hip, and a third undergoing radiation treatments for prostate cancer.  Winter of our discontent, indeed!

I daily rage against the insanity of the Presidential campaign....dear heavens, Trump?  To represent the United States?  Having insulted everyone?

And there is that second line..."Made glorious summer by this son of York..."  So these desolate days will be made perfect again by a new commander.  How wonderful that would be - but TRUMP?!

Our country is great and not swooning.  Yes, it isn't perfect but it is great.  We have weathered hard economic times and come through.  Now is the time for perfecting what was started, not desecrating our country.  There will always be work to do.

I thought of the Emperor's New Clothes, that wonderful tale of a leader who thought he was so perfect and convinced everyone else he was incredible, that a "tailor" could actually sell him invisible clothes that could only be seen by the informed, as it were.  Since no one, including the emperor, wanted to be seen as stupid, they all agreed that yes, the royal robes were magnificent.  Except a small boy, who laughed at the charade and the naked emperor....He saw through it all, and pointed it out.  We need that small boy now to take down Trump.  Many, many "small boys" to do that.

Bob and I watched an old Twilight Zone.  The upstart politician wanted to start a movement, a revolution. He wasn't listened to, until he was told that making an "in" class and an "out" class would bind the majority together against the outsiders, a common theme for Rod Serling.  But seeing it with Trump in mind was terrifying.  Of course, in the end, the character morphs into Hitler.

History and literature are there with so many examples that we don't have to go far.  We just need to remember the lessons of the past in order not to repeat them.