The Emperor's New Clothes?

{This was originally posted on my Facebook account; it got a bit longer than I expected and probably would have been better here on my blog, so I am going to archive it here as well.}

Inspired by a conversation I had today, in which I said that the next +/- 4 years are going to be a "giant exercise in 'reductio ad absurdum.'"

Have you ever had something that was broken, if you were honest about it, but it still kind of worked, and so you just put up with it and fussed with it and 'made it work,' because you didn't want to go through the hassle of having to get it fixed or find a new one?
And then once the thing finally broke the rest of the way, and you had no choice but to repair or replace it, didn't you think, "Wow, I should have done that a long time ago, it's so much easier to use one that works"?

So here's what I'm getting at. I freely admit that I've disagreed with nearly everything our new president has done so far. But there may be a blessing here, and if so, it is this: Things were broken before the election. The income gap has been out of control for years. Large swaths of our population are treated as guilty until proven innocent. Healthcare is still inaccessible for many.

But, things weren't broken enough for the majority to stop putting up with it and finally fix it.
Until now. Instead of patching yet another chip in the windshield, the first thing This Guy does is run up and put a sledgehammer through it, Macintosh-1984-commercial style. All the brokenness that already existed is now being put on unabashed, unapologetic display for the entire world to see. And it's bloody embarrassing, as a country, to know that now the world can see how bad we let it get, just because we didn't want to have to try to fix it.

My hope is that the protests and the record numbers of calls to Congress that we are seeing now are the signs that finally, the majority can't even pretend it still works anymore, and they're finally starting to demand a repair or a replacement.