We are only a few weeks away from the title of this blog entry. Trump is already announcing appointments to his Cabinet. So far Donald has surprised critics and supporters by not doing anything surprising. He is appointing the same Republican hacks that he ran against and criticized in the Primaries. Instead of “Making America great again,” he’s making America Republican again. Ho hum!
His supporters are starting to grumble that he isn’t the revolutionary they expected or voted for. Democrats and traditional Republicans, including myself, are sighing with relief that he isn’t. President Donald Trump will just be another Republican President like Nixon or Reagan only more colorful and bombastic.
He’s kinda like a President Swartinegger would be if Arnold could have run. He wanted to, but he couldn’t get an amendment to the Constitution removing the requirement that the President be a “Natural born citizen.” Some hard liners interpret that to mean born on American soil. I guess if Canadian-born Ted Cruz decides to run again in four or eight years, he will be the test of what “Natural born citizen,” really means.
My nephew married a Czech woman in Berlin and they have two children that were born there. They are living in Prague in the Czech Republic now, and have one child born there. All three children have dual citizenship, American on their father’s side and Czech on their mother’s side.
When I visited my brother in Maine a few weeks ago we went to a diner for lunch. It was a nice sit-down restaurant with booths, but the food was much better than diner food here usually is. The waitress was from Poland, and my brother asked her about the similarities between Polish and Czech. I didn’t realize that Polish and Czech come from the same root language.
My brother is very good at languages. I am good at American English but not much else. I studied Latin in High School and German in College. Several of my family members spoke German when I was growing up, but I can’t speak or understand much spoken German now.
Language is a wall that keeps people apart. Sometimes even the same language, English for example, can be used to keep people apart especially with political rhetoric. Too much of that has been going on this past year.
In his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t like a wall," but his neighbor wanted to keep the wall between their properties. "Good fences make good neighbors," Frost's neighbor would say.
Frost, like Shakespeare and Mark Twain, was one of the most insightful commentators on human behavior. Each in his own way wrote about how separating ourselves doesn’t work, even if Romeo and Juliette had to commit suicide to get their families to realize how stupid feuds are.
