Is It Safe?

A few years ago I painted a watercolor entitled, “Is It Safe?”  A man is peering over the edge of his life, unsure of what’s ahead while a giant tongue hangs over him like the sun in our universe. The tongue is the nonstop BS in life that renders us hopeless, or euphoric, depending on how much coffee we’ve had.

“Is it safe?” I ask myself this question, in various forms, all the time. Each of us makes decisions every day that have the element of safety in them. At a crossroads, I wait until it is safe to drive or walk. I assume the food I eat won’t be poisonous. And that hooded guy standing in the shadows—yeah, maybe it would be better to cross over to the other side of the street. Many of the things I do every day are intended to keep me safe, and since they have worked this long, I don’t think about them.  Perhaps, I should. Perhaps, one can be too safe. Or, perhaps, this is wisdom.

President Trump toys with “Is it safe?” every day. He loves to create fear, especially with the specter that hordes of illegal criminals are crossing our borders every day with the purpose of destroying the fabric of our society. He only needs one bad hombre to prove that we need a wall, that our borders must be shut down.

He has shoved “Is it safe?” into the American psyche. He uses walls and guns as salve to heal the wounds created by Trump World facts.

Unfortunately, the opposition wants to win through debate. Folks, it is a street fight, not a debate, when one side bludgeons the other with altered facts, aka, lies.

The challenge today is to move on from crossing the street safely to defeating the fear mongers at every level, from the national conscience to the ballot boxes, otherwise, it won’t be safe.