The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects of a Sunday morning:

The New Reality that has Everyone Flummoxed!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 23, 2017

The new reality that everyone is experiencing in America but which no one is addressing much less talking about including all the well-paid pundits and journalists is that we finally have a corporate president that not only has created his own wealth, but has found his children and the people his children have married creating their own as well.

Without planning to, I have been writing about President Donald J. Trump for years with a simple message, one that has found few readers, but which “The Donald” manifests to the last crossing of the t’s and the dotting of the i’s.

He embraces challenges he doesn’t run from them; embraces his fears doesn’t run from them; embraces his controversies and malapropisms doesn’t run from them; and he embraces his enemies and doesn’t run from them.  How odd, to be president without being presidential; to be loyal to yourself and your quest come hell or high water.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and his brothers Robert and Ted Kennedy were millionaires, but all of them with inherited wealth that allowed them to economically coast through life, whereas Donald Trump took his father’s suburban real-estate business of some value, but essentially stagnating, and was able to turn it into an international corporate empire embracing all kinds of obstacles and impediments but managing through the power of mind, bravado, confidence and courage to succeed and fail on a colossal level over and over and over again, always picking himself up and moving forward, always forward.

We often put such people in a separate category that is marked with all our own biases and rationalizations as we paradoxically are inclined to underestimate them as being less than intelligent and honorable human beings, seeing them instead as devious achievers while having no idea of what it has taken for them to rise to the level that they have.

Consequently, few including members of his own acquired Republican Party took him seriously as a candidate.  This was also true of the celebrity culture of Hollywood as well as the pundits and journalists from one end to the other of these United States. 

It was easy to see him as a blowhard, bombastic and not a man of substance or intelligence.  How could he stand on the same stage as the venerated son of one president and the brother of another in the person of Jeb Bush?

He not only punctured the Jeb Bush façade almost from the opening debate surrounded by 16 other potential presidential candidates, but did so by questioning his energy and repressed sensitiveness. 

No one has ever questioned the now 71-year-old President Trump’s energy, or his resolute determination to win the presidency by working the final 36 hours to the November 2016 election with little if any sleep, traveling from one state to another to yet another to the very last moment. 

He has been called arrogant as if the word were a pejorative, which Webster so defines it, but Webster also says it is the disposal to exaggerate one’s worth or importance.  I say balderdash to that. 

If we are not in our own corner; if we do not esteem ourselves; if we do not embrace that which we happen to be with full acceptance; if we are not loyal to the soul of that being in every way, but depend on what others think of us, value in us, believe in us, and choose to esteem us to be, we become the epitome of the cage that others have created for us.  We are not an individual; we are a stereotype.   

Donald Trump’s message that resonated with many forgotten Americans was “Make America Great Again!”  What could be more arrogant and yet more simple than that?

We recently had a president that went to Europe and apologized for America’s wealth, America’s energy; America’s resilience; America’s economy; America’s military and industrial flexibility; America’s inventiveness; America’s confidence, and yes, America’s arrogance.

We were told this is the way to win friends and influence people, but it always backfires and it has backfired in this latest instance by a world submerged in dependence on the United States for its largesse. 

When an individual or a company or a country does more for its people than it expects its people to do for themselves it weakens them and their resolve and diminishes them as a people. 

When an individual, a company, a country, indeed, a civilization is in a dependent mode on one society in particular, in this case the United States, to shore up its economy, finance its defense, and fight its battles be they economic, political or military, you have the Western World that has been created since World War Two.

For the past thirty years, I have been writing on this theme but essentially with regard to the individual exhorting that individual to be loyal to himself; to be his own best friend; to worry more about how he feels and thinks about himself before worrying about how others think and feel about him.  This theme has gone counter to our predominant Western belief system going against that prevalent cultural grain. 

Yet, if we do for others at the expense of ourselves, we do them no favor.  Instead, this leads to our inevitable collective sadness if not insanity, as we now have created a world that is not full of self-love, but rather consumed with self-hate.  For confirmation, you need only turn on your television or surf the Internet.

President Donald J. Trump may not survive the constant attacks for believing in himself and embracing his challenges, but he represents a new day.  Destroy him, and you destroy something in all of us that has heretofore not survived World War Two.  Alas, there is an army out to do just that, and if it succeeds, we will be in full retreat not only from the future but from what has represented the survival mode of our past.