An Historical Destruction

Personally, I blame myself.  I have been too complacent.  I certainly knew there were wing-nuts in the party, but the Dems have their crazies, too.  I figured the lunatic fringe were like flatulence.  If you are going to digest food you have to create gas.  No one wants it, but it is a natural byproduct. 
            I also am a realist.  I know that politics is a system of negotiations.  Like buying or selling a car, you go in with a ridiculous figure, deep into your personal wish list, knowing that you will have to trade off some of that for a compromise that gives everyone a little skin in the game.  While wing nuts are like spoiled children who want only their way and see anything less as a loss, adults know that a compromise is the finest achievement of mature minds.  It is acknowledgement that any good idea has some overlap with other good ideas and theses shaded areas on the Venn diagram offer opportunities of mutual advancement.
            But the wing-nuts are always more motivated than the rank-and-file members of any organization.  St. George wasn’t pro-damsel; he was anti-dragon.  These crazy, mean spirited, hate-filled people have, during this election cycle, taken control of a party that has, for a life-time, held my allegiance. 
            I do understand their anger.  My parents worked themselves into early graves.  Both Mom and Dad worked outside the home.  We were poor.  Mom would work all week, spend Saturday doing laundry in the basement of our rented home with a wringer washer and carry baskets of wet laundry up the wooden steps and then hang them on the line.  Dad worked 50-60 hours a week at the dairy and all of this was during our “good” years, long after the really dark years of traveling from town to town in our car looking for day labor and living on bologna sandwiches and water for days on end.  Now the Dems tell me that all of their efforts counted for not one damn thing because my parents were nothing more than the recipients of “white privilege.”  
            The insults to both common sense and reality don’t end there either.  If I believe in the rights of a viable fetus to live instead of being cut up and sold for parts I am part of a war on women.  If I believe that all lives matter, I am a racist (and my years marching for Civil Rights when it was actually dangerous to do so don’t count either).  If I believe in the rule of law, I am a fascist.  Christianity is to be suppressed, but all other religions are to be protected.  In her first debate Hillary Clinton said she was proud to call Republicans her enemies.  Had a Republican said the same thing they would have been castigated for hate speech. 
            Like I said, I understand the anger.  But anger doesn’t make you right.  Invective doesn’t equal intelligence.  Hatred doesn’t seek compromise, and enemies don’t have mutual goals.  Yet, anger, invective, hatred and enemies seem to be winning the day, all made manifest by Donald Trump, a man who isn’t even, by any definition save his own, a Republican.
            I am watching the destruction of the Party of Lincoln, helpless to do anything about it.  Unless the GOP disavows Trump I can no longer call myself a Republican.  Nor can I support the Democrats who are intent upon destroying this country, the rule of law and capitalism.  I am still a Republican at heart but I have no party and that saddens me… 
            …and yet, I keep the faith.