You’re not the only one, @MsJinks.
I’ve been seeing a meme (if that’s what it’s called?) recently which quotes a speech Meryl Streep made at the Golden Globes in 2017. Part of what she said:
"An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people and let you feel what that feels like … there was one performance this year that stunned me, it sank its hooks in my heart. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter — someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back.
It kind of broke my heart when I saw it.”
Streep continued by saying: “This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence invites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”
(Quotes taken from here: https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/meryl-streep-calls-out-trump-at-golden-globes-233339)
His jeering at a disabled journalist and not being called out for it by the Republicans was when I realised that we were doomed and going to hell in a handcart. I still can’t get over that. (Nor a lot else, obviously, but that was so callous, and so telling about the man and his supporters.) The other thing I’ve been pondering about this morning (as a bit of a distraction from the forest fires which are currently raging in Cyprus, sadly leaving people dead, and destroying some of the most beautiful mountain wine producing villages: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/two-dead-homes-burn-massive-cyprus-wildfire-2025-07-24/ if you’re interested), is his horrible inherent racism. He is clearly a vile human being, but he also clearly represents the thinking of many voting Americans, which is even more disturbing. I think what I and presumably many others, saw as a bee in his bonnet and a twisted way to try to discredit his predecessor, his insistence that President Obama was not an American by birth, actually revealed his true feelings about any non-whites who were more successful than him by dint of their own hard work, as opposed to the luck of birth that his inheritance from his father gave him, and presaged ICE.
Sorry, I’m rambling.
And then, there’s this: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jfk-grandson-rips-move-to-name-kennedy-center-theater-after-melania-trump/ar-AA1J9LSp
(Apologies if I’ve missed mention of it earlier in the thread.)
Please excuse my rant. When I was a bra-burning student in the Seventies, I never imagined that things would have regressed to this extent by the time I was 70. Bugger it.