PROVOCATEURS

Sandy-eyed sleepers resent the sun coming through morning blinds. The sun does not care. It is in its own life cycle. It is a star with its own birth, aging and inevitable death. Human beings once thought it was a god, attuned to human actions, thoughts and emotions. It is just a star, a star which happens to support and rule our lives coincidentally to its own. 

The sleeper may feel provoked by those morning rays disturbing dreams that are preferable to reality. The sleeper might be relieved to be awoken from a nightmare. The sun does not care. It is what it is and will be until it is no more. It is a galactic provocateur without intent. 

The seemingly bottomless rage of some human beings at anything Trump resembles, in my mind, the grumbling sleeper's lament. President Trump has awoken the sleeping who felt self-satisfied and content with the mental anesthetics dished out by the savvy media machines of presidents from Reagan through Obama. The Reagan fan club, the Bush fan club, the Clinton fan club, the Obama fan club. Rah, rah. "Tell us what we want to hear, and we will feel like the superior human beings we must be." While America slept, its pockets were picked clean by international corporations, international banks and international speculators. 

Social media began to replace the less subtle White House propaganda machine under Obama. After 2008 when Obama and Democrat Congress finished selling out the middle class, already well duped by Clinton and G. W. Bush, mass distraction of a non-governmental nature was absolutely necessary to anesthetize America's middle class to sleep while the government aided corporations in fully gutting it on the altar of falsely moral globalism. 

Along came Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Loud intruders upon the sleep of the electorate. Unlike the stealthy brightness of the morning sun, these provocateurs are attention burglars banging pans in the mental kitchen of the middle class. Awakening from the Obama sleep was harsh for most Americans, but many Black Americans were jarred more than others. They were happily dreaming of an America where it would remain justified to be indefinitely dependent on the government. The dream of reparation for slavery in the form of endless entitlements and immunity from general laws based on their race. 

Trump and Sanders smashed the dreamy illusions of placid America in different ways. Sanders thrust the banner of social democracy in the faces of tax cheats, environmental profiteers and predatory corporations. The incompatibility of socialist and democratic ideals in a elite-controlled republic doomed Sanders' candidacy from the start. Trump was the brutal voice of the relentless old man who tells you your chores have to be done even though it is Sunday morning. "Get up and work for your allowance ... and follow the house rules." His message of housecleaning and return to nationalism is as ancient as the Roman Empire, an earlier elite-controlled republic which outgrew its own citizens' needs in favor of globalist trade and wealth accumulation by the few at the expense of the global many.  

The depth of some Americans' sleep can be measured by the depth of their persistent whining outrage over anything Trump. Perhaps this is the new class divide in the U.S.. The fact is that even these tortured souls are awake. They see the country they are living in, despite their dogged attempts to roll over and deny the dawn. And perhaps the nasty old man banging pans next to their mental mattresses is what was required to wake them. Provocateurs most frequently serve to draw attention to the problems the sleeping many wish to deny. In an increasingly un-representational republic like the current U.S. government, what the awakened do may not change the direction of the country. Frustration may deteriorate into increased tribalism and discontent. But that outcome is not the fault of the provocateur, who follows his own path, like the sun, with the same lack of concern for other individuals.