The Untouchables
In the wicked caste system of old India, still unofficially present in practice, the lowest class of society are called the untouchables. They are the folks whose short lives are set, by their circumstances of birth, into misery, profound poverty and injustice. They are most often those who are reviled for the darkest skin tones and their birth into poverty and filth. Their very religion generally dooms them to lives without hope and without medical care or sustaining nutrition, often to live with and die from vile diseases and conditions adding to a another level of “untouchability.” As America considers its next president and Congress, it must also consider its own class of untouchables. In the wealth of our still great, but foundering nation, we don’t have an untouchable class of the impoverished and ill. Rather, our untouchables are those who have either achieved great wealth, celebrity, and position or have had it thrust upon them.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are two alarmingly obvious examples of American untouchables. Both have successfully skirted the law of the land by obfuscation and favor, if not by intrigue and bribery. Donald Trump is no son of liberty. Rather, with the confidence that he can successfully manipulate and litigate those he has injured into ultimate destruction, he blithely boasts that if he loses the campaign for the presidency, he can return to his “great life” and “a long vacation.” Clinton plods on, trivializing the corruption questions surrounding her time in the Obama Administration, itself plagued by Constitutional improprieties.
How can Trump avoid the customary penalties for unethical business practices, legal abuses, bankruptcy and foreclosure that middle and lower, even other wealthy class people face? How can Clinton avoid repercussion from her carelessness with national work product that other government workers face? They, through notoriety, celebrity, or some antiAmerican notion of bigness that is too big to fail, are untouchable.
Trump can obviously and cavalierly threaten the life of Hillary Clinton, by someone else’s hands whose actions he has stoked and justified, though to do so is a violation of federal law. Clinton can, with her email scandal, so to speak, “shoot the sheriff, but not the deputy” as the old song goes, and promise to never do it again. Both candidates are liars, cheats, and powermongers who seem to have little moral mooring.
Well-meaning folks have justified and ignored the words and actions of these two people to the contradiction of every value of their own moral being. That we have not as a people demanded integrity, but excused ineptitude at best, and insidiousness at worst, has brought us to the point that we did not choose a principled or honorable candidate on the republican side, rather a heavy handed buffoon and longtime enabler of elitists like Clinton. Neither is trustworthy with the heritage of our great nation. Yet, only one is so woefully unknowledgeable, unconcerned, inexperienced, unprepared, flippant, yet despotic, ill tempered, irrational and reactionary as to be utterly unfit. That candidate is Donald Trump, the preeminent untouchable.
Though this piece is an indictment of Trump, it is not to be misconstrued as an endorsement of a loathsome Hillary Clinton. It is a plea to Americans to resist the impulsiveness of voting for a self-evidenced autocrat, Donald Trump, in contradiction to everything historically American and, thereby, risking our existence as a federal republic. The ultimate untouchable must not have ultimate power at his, yes, stubby fingertips.