Something that comes up repeatedly in the era of Donald John Trump is the lack of accountability and consequences for the brazen and nefarious lies that he and his minions have spewed and continue to spew. The cry goes out, “Will they not be punished?!”
Ah, but karma does not work that way. Karma works this way: the punishments will come, in the future. The liars may be among those punished. Or their children. Or their friends. Or complete strangers. But there is no definitive way to say who will receive the punishments of the karma they have created through their lies. That would be too easy.
We can hazard some guesses, though.
The Republican party will be punished. As we will keep hearing about this era for the rest of our lives, and as new and horrid details will continue to bubble up from this poisonous bog long after even the staunchest of the brainiacs who now support Donald John Trump have soured on hearing his very name, the heads will again and again turn to the Republicans and ask, “How could you do nothing?!”
The future will be punished by fallout from these years. Loss of trust, weakening of international institutions, strengthening of despotic regimes, and more will have lasting effects causing us to spend more time and money and effort to build and keep a useful world for humans to prosper in. The future will turn to the Republicans and ask them that same question. And those of them who have to fight to keep the peace in foreign lands squeezed in the vices of famine and drought, they too will pose similar questions to the nation and to the Republicans particularly.
And you and I. We will be punished. For we will have to hear about every last shitty thing done in the name of the United States by Donald John Trump and his ilk. We will be punished with the knowledge that we’re spending time cleaning up rather than making new strides. Knowing we live in a country less than it could be for the lamest of reasons. And we will have to hear the same question posed to the Republicans every single year from here to our ends. And we will have to listen to their sorry excuses or their new lies:
- I did not support him.
- We didn’t know it was so.
- We were afraid of losing our seats.
- We were confirming so many judges, it was like a drug.
- We were blinded by his lies.
- We were addled by our sleeping pills.
- The liberals were so annoying that we thought it was good to make them angry.
- It was a fad we all bought into at the time, like bellbottoms or hoola hoops.
- We thought the whole universe was a simulation.
- Donald who?
And so on.
Yes, there are consequences. There is karma. There will be punishments, irregularly distributed, to the innocent as well as the guilty. Such is life. It is self-correcting, on a long enough timeline, bending toward justice as the wicked are found out, as the ignorant are disabused, and as the rest of us stare on, baffled and disgusted but seemingly incapable of escape from these sick and sad mysteries.
“Karma’s a big dummy,” I hear you say. “It shouldn’t work that way at all.” But that’s like saying gravity is a dummy. Karma is. It’s a force, not a judge.