There's a life lesson most of us learned during our rebellious teen years: if you constantly toe the line, push limits, challenge rules, publicly challenge authority, you will inevitably amass a large number of people who are just drooling while waiting for you to slip up and actually cross that line. When you do, no matter how mildly or insignificantly, those people will race in to make an example of you. You will face punishment, ridicule, embarrassment, humiliation, condemnation, etc. completely out of proportion to the slip up.
It's like that old "I'm not touching you" game where siblings taunt each other, usually after driving their parents crazy until one parent explodes out the "STOP TOUCHING EACH OTHER NOW" command, and since the order was screamed in that desperate frustration all kids recognize as "oh no, they're really angry now, we'd better listen," you finally sit back in that spacious rear seat of the car you've been stuck in for 6 or 8 or 10 hours, and decide to listen ...for a minute. Then you hold your hand directly in your brother's face, but NOT touching him, just because what else is there to do in that back seat? (I actually believe this is why car seats were invented) And of course, your brother does the same thing to you, but NOT actually touching you, and you both realize this game is even more annoying than the fighting that took place before the STOP TOUCHING command was given. And of course, you slip up and touch each other and the actual fighting begins all over again, only this time, dad has had enough. He pulls the car over, and drags you both out of the back seat, and the real beatings commence. It was just a matter of time.
As stated, most of us learned this during the teen years. Then most of us grew up and either stopped challenging everything all the time, picking our battles, saving our energy for prioritized fights, or we just got too busy with our lives, making a living, contributing to society in other ways, etc. and so on. Either way, MOST of us learned the lesson as we became adults. One might even posit that this is one of the lessons that makes us an adult. So why then do so many people believe a man who failed to learned this lesson in seven decades on the planet is the victim of a "political witch hunt?"
There's nothing political about it. It wasn't political when we were 15, before we learned this lesson everyone learns. The only thing different here is that TinyD never seems to have learned the lesson. Anyone remotely curious about the world's events knows that TinyD has squandered his inheritance in ways that always border on the illegal, dive deeply into the unethical, and are considered squarely immoral by most of the population. You cannot have been alive during the TinyD era and not know his tax dodge schemes, his inflated net worth, his hiring of undocumented immigrants and his failure to pay them, his illegal dumping, mishandling of hazardous materials, his shady real estate deals, his lawsuits against orphanages and school districts, his fake charities and donations. I mean, there really is just too much to list. There's no question, for those of us with our heads not buried in sand, that TinyD is and remains a scum bag - not always a criminal, but certainly someone who publicly, willingly, unashamedly, even boastfully toed every line he ever encountered. And we all know that when you make that your practice, you occasionally slip over that line, even if it's just one toe. We also all know that when you make that your practice, and you inevitably slip up, there will be a crowd cheering for you to be made an example of.
So, again, for most of us, we learn this lesson during our high school years. That first time we slip up and get caught, we feel like it's us against the world, that everyone is suddenly against us ...almost like it was a witch hunt! Some of us never learn and keep getting beat down by what in reality are our own mistakes from which we refuse to learn. We call those people who can't learn from their own mistakes or accept the consequences of their own actions "rebels" when they are teenagers, but when they refuse to learn well into adulthood - into their seventies, for instance - well then we call them psychopaths.
Anyhoo, like I said, once you learn this lesson, you realize there's nothing "political" about it. It's not a "witch hunt." It's just the consequence of one's actions. Most of us learned that when we were teens.
Luth
Out
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