...or perhaps, an Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

No matter how the election turns out it will still be true that millions of Americans will have voted for perhaps the most loathsome, despicable, and vile individual to ever to live in this country.

As David Brooks (conservative NY Times columnist, and former Republican) says in today’s column, “most disturbing, all of this {cruelty, bigotry, narcissism, selfishness, etc.} has been greeted with moral numbness. The truest thing Trump said all year is that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. We learned this year that millions of Americans are incapable of being morally offended, or of putting virtue above partisanship.”

These people, supposed Christians among them, walk among us. As in the book and film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they look like humans, but beneath the exterior they are—alien.

Although truly deplorable, these aliens can’t be deported, and they are entitled to vote. So, somehow, if the country is to live long and prosper, they need to be brought back into the fold—brought back into the society of reasonable, thoughtful citizens, caring more about country than about wacky single issues, conspiracies, or personal resentments.

I suggest three things: 1) universal basic income, 2) the world’s best (free) public education through at least grade 16, and, 3) universal public service for all young people (either military or in something like the depression era Civil Conservation Corps {CCC} [which was utterly amazing]). Each of these will have the effect of: getting disparate folk to rub shoulders; of providing shared experience; and of making obvious the fact that we inhabit a great country and that together we can make it almost as good a Canada.