Donald Trump is Wound Collector in Chief.
This might be his biggest fault.
Sure, his lack of understanding of foreign-policy and the world economy are pretty scary. But I admit I favor his China and North Korea policy, so far. It’s a bit bumbling but it is the only alternative to no real options with North Korea.
Still, Trump is causing greater divides within America and it has nothing to do with being new on the job. He appears to be more concerned about consolidating power and stroking his ego. His paper thin skin is the perfect conductive material for his out of control Wound Collecting.
What is wound collecting? It is finding any small thing – a word, a phrase, a post, a gesture, an idea – that you can manipulate into looking like a grievous offense to get noticed or take advantage of.
Jihadists like ISIS have a PhD in Wound Collecting. Tom Friedman talks about it in, Thank You for Being Late. He blames the Islamic terrorists and jihadist movement and its recruitment on Middle Eastern, Muslim families and groups who get together and complain about how the West treats them. It festers further as their leaders, mostly petro dictators, do nothing to advance education or their economies, leading to angry young men who have no jobs and only dream of religious glory by killing “infidels”.
Donald Trump is really no different. And what’s worse he fosters it.
We see it every day. He thinks he won the popular vote. His Inauguration crowd size was bigger than Obama’s. He thinks being only a few months on the job has changed the economy for the better. He thinks he’s created jobs because of ridiculing CEOs. Just look at his rallies. He is still in campaign mode. He has not been in leader mode.
Sure, there is wound collecting all over America. It is a national pastime. And yes, you can point at others. But Trump is President of the United States!
It was supposed to be his job to bring us together.
Yes, we can charge the so-called aggrieved gunmen who shot Congressman Scalise a wound collector of enormous proportions, very much like a terrorist. He believed he needed a semi-automatic gun to avenge the nation against the Republican and Trump ways. So, we ponder this: the wounds of Trump’s words and Scalise’s policy votes were worthy of being shot? Of course, not.
But what is the reason for this wound collecting then? It’s simple. The man was mentally sick. He was addicted to the American epidemic of Wound Collecting.
But aren’t we all addicted?
Democrats harp on the Russian intrusion into the elections as the main reason to obstruct Trump and the GOP. But the reality of the race is this:
- Democrats have no real national policy
- Dems have no real health care plan improvements over Obama Care
- Hillary ran a horrible campaign that couldn’t combat the fake news or hacks coming out of Russia.
- Dems can make more money by being the opposition party as the GOP enjoyed against Obama.
Wound collecting runs Congress too. The GOP criticizes Democrats and Obama for passing the ACA in private. Yet they “wound back” by doing the same – and even worse.
Read Strangers in Their Own Land. Many Southern, white, older men think minorities and immigrants have jumped the line in front of them to steal their piece of the American Dream. They blame minorities for their lack of jobs while dismissing the facts that technology and cheaper wages abroad are the real causes. Then they vote for lawmakers to give breaks to companies that pollute and destroy their environment — using migrant workers.
They are under the delusion that coal jobs are coming back when coal as an energy source is dying.
They are under the delusion that immigrants are killing America when immigrants are the reason America thrives and grows.
Older white people think immigrants and foreigners are draining our medical system when in reality it is them who will cause the financial disaster that Medicare will become in the next 5 to 10 years.
But it is not just Right Wing Wound Collectors.
- We see the women’s marches in protest of Trump exclude any women who are for women’s rights but happen to oppose abortion.
- We hear the protests that Trump is a womanizer and misogynist but they knew that before the election and yet 45% of women voted for him. Maybe many of you didn’t vote?
- Then we see wound collecting used as a weapon. States like Missouri are proposing bills allowing pregnant women or women who use contraceptive to be fired. This is a weapon against the city of St. Louis that upheld these women’s rights. We see rural lawmakers and city lawmakers finding wounds to use.
- We see it on cable news. Watch MSNBC and Fox News simultaneously. They cover the same story but with totally different talking points or wound points. If you watch more than two hours a day of any cable news station then you are just injecting yourself with hateful doses of Wound Collecting.
- We see it in sports. There are certain basketball players who act like they have never committed a foul in their lives.
Are there ways to stop this epidemic?
Look a
t other leaders who stopped wound collecting to save their countries. In his book The Fix, Jonathan Tepperman profiles a number of leaders who brought their nations together.
One of them is Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda. You want to talk about real wounds? Rwanda suffered the most heinous of massive exterminations back in 1994. Through his leadership, Kagame has brought healing back to Rwanda and it is today a country on the rise.
The Fix also shares stories of other leaders from: Mexico overcoming deep political divisions; and Indonesia that found a way to stop Islamic terrorism in an embracing way. Do all the solutions last? Not always. But at least they tried and succeeded for a period of time.
And ask yourself this: aren’t we better than those countries? We think so. We keep saying that. But maybe not.
Actually that is the other big wound collection. We are the United States of America and yet we feel like we have been taken advantage of. If we’re so great how did we get taken advanta
ge of? Maybe we failed to see what our wound collecting has done to make our nation more brittle?
Not asking those questions is a very dangerous path.
And again to stop this, it is up to us. Our leaders won’t do it. Wound collecting means revenue streams for them.
So how do we stop it?
We need massive changes in the way we think and react to each other.
In his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck, Mark Manson talks about how social media has become a national wound fest. He suggest people stop and think before they tweet about some grievance that is really minor but they use for political or financial gain.
My suggestion is if you oppose someone’s point of view, first acknowledge that viewpoint’s credibility then offer yours — without personal attack. (I know that takes a lot of work. If it is too much work, then don’t post at all.)
In their book, The Like Switch, two PhDs, one is an FBI counter-intelligence consultant, shows how you can diffuse tense situations in everyday life by learning a few simple tricks on how to read people and create more light than heat.
It takes some work to overcome. But all addictions do.
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