Follow the leader

Twenty years or so ago, Mike O’Dell was putting together a weekly paper in McCook to compete with the Gazette and asked me to write a weekly column for it. In his introduction of me and my column, he described me as being “irascible.” That word is defined as having or showing a tendency to be easily angered which I disagreed with because that has never been my nature. But I do sometimes fit a secondary characterization of the word as being “edgy.”

For the past two years, it’s been hard not to be “edgy” although heaven knows I’ve tried. Most of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances are Republicans and there aren’t many in the area that are Democrats like me. So I’ve tried to avoid the topics of politics and religion when I meet and talk with them but it’s been to no avail. Someone always brings our differences up just to get my goat and, consequently, I’ve had to sever my ties with many of them.

Dick Trail, in Tuesday’s edition of this newspaper, wrote in his column that I should avoid drinking the “kool aid” of the Washington Post. This advice was given even though I suspect he is an avid viewer of the Fox Network and a regular listener to Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. It has always been amazing to me how people can criticize other people for doing the same things they’re doing without seeing or admitting that but it continues to happen.

We are caught up in a tidal wave of “follow the leader” where approximately 45% of the voting public believes that President Trump does no wrong and tells no lies. I pity the poor Pentecostals who tied themselves to the President’s coattails on the abortion issue and then stuck their heads in the sand when it came to his adultery, divorce, remarriage, homophobia, sexism and racism. It takes quite a balancing act to accept one and act as if the others don’t exist.

President Trump’s Vice-President, Mike Pence, has run into a bit of opposition from church-supported colleges because the students find the same conflict of interest between Pence and his President as I do. Five thousand students in his home state recently filed a protest concerning his being the graduation speaker at their alma mater because of this duality that’s almost impossible to explain.

When I retired from the MCC three years ago after 22 years of doing what I loved, our division chair, Chad Swanson, was asked to make some comments about me and he quickly told the audience about the warnings he had received from other faculty members about my “trouble-causing” ways. He then went on to explain how delightful it had been to work with me because I wasn’t anything like the picture that had been painted of me by others.

So yes, when the time calls for being edgy, I can be edgy because no one has all the right answers all the time, not even me, and it irritates me when I run into people who think they do.

This past week, I watched a four part series on CNN titled “Tricky Dick.” As you can imagine, it was about former President Richard Nixon and before Dick Trail and his friends go out of the way to try and prove the network’s prejudice against Richard Nixon, the entire four part series was composed of tape-recorded messages in Nixon’s own voice from the White House that Nixon himself had approved. Even though I admit to being politically partisan, it would be amazing to me if a card-carrying Republican could listen to those four hours and not come away disgusted at Nixon’s hatred of the Jews, his racial and ethnic prejudices, his full-blown knowledge of the Watergate burglary and his admittance that if it was money the White House needed to keep this quiet, that he could get his hands on a million dollars personally to pay off whoever needed to be paid off.

These words came from the mouth of our President and I thought as I listened to one diatribe after another peppered with frequent curse words that the primary difference between Nixon and Trump is that Trump makes his tirades public while Nixon talked this way only to his inner circle.

It doesn’t seem like we’re learned very much as a society in the 48 years that have passed between President Nixon and President Trump.