Trump and Kim Jong Un: We Will Be Known By the Company We Keep
By: Lisa M. Hayes – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
When I was in sixth grade I was the odd kid out. I was unarguably uncool. As I’m sure you know, nothing matters more in middle school. Cool can feel like a matter of survival. As a predictable matter of course, my resolute uncoolness made me the target of some bullying. Looking back, it wasn’t that bad. At the time, it felt like the gauntlet every single day.
So, by the time seventh grade rolled around, I decided on an ill-fated course of survival. At any cost, I would befriend the bullies. This is a strategy that rarely works. It didn’t work out well for me. However, not for lack of trying. At first, I tried what made logical sense. I made every attempt to be nice to them. When that failed, I took a different approach. I started modeling their behavior, and this was not a nice group of kids. I started picking on other kids and I got in some trouble.
At the end of my seventh-grade-year, my parents sat me down and told me we were moving. There were a lot of things that factored into that move. However, I will never forget my father explaining to me that my parents were seeing changes in me. They didn’t like who I was being. They didn’t like my friends. I didn’t want to move. I promised I’d clean up my act. I sobbed and pleaded to say that if we stayed, I’d change my ways and my friends.
But my father stood firm. “You will always be the product of the company you keep and you will be known by their deeds.” My father, as usual, was right.
So, we packed up our station wagon and a moving truck and left. Eight-grade was a different ballgame.
In the last few days, we have seen a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy.
Anyone who’s doesn’t live in a cave has actually been watching this play out for months. Putin’s investment in purchasing a U.S. president has shifted U.S. tone regarding Russia in ways that defy logic and years of international foreign policy.
However, Trump’s performance and attitudes at the G7 Summit left the international community shaken. Within 48 hours Trump bashed the President of Canada on Twitter and sat smiling, thumbs up with one of the worlds most vicious dictators for all the cameras to record.
G7 was a disaster on too many fronts to count. With relationships with allies already strained over Trump’s tariffs and the drum up of international trade wars, he tipped the scales quite possibly forever, when he rambled on about letting Russia back in the club. The G7 based international community, rightfully, was not having it.
You see, the club is changing. Under Trump foreign policy, our list of allies is shifting. Trump is most comfortable in the company of authoritarian dictators. The likes of Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin feel more like peers to a man who likes to rule based on loyalty pledges and bashes the free press. The international landscape is rapidly shifting and the rest of the world has every right to be wondering what the fuck is going on.
The world has every right to judge us by the company we keep and that company at this point is suspect. The U.S. is buddying up to dictators with some of the worst human rights records in history. At this point, we are locking children up in cages in facilities that look like concentration camps led by a President that courts the Alt-Right. We are wildly implementing “America first” policies that isolate us from the rest of the world in ways that can’t be predicted. We pulled out of the Iran Nuclear deal with a bang only to weeks later sign a sham of a nothing agreement with North Korea.
We will be known by the company we keep and behaving like a bully in the international community will only make us popular with other bullies.
I wish we could send out an SOS to the international community begging for help. My prayer is that they recognize what’s happened to us and that someday someone will send help. My fear though is that we will be judged by our president as if we chose him and that history will not smile on that choice.
2018 will go down in history as the year that decided the fate of our democracy. The congressional races at hand matter more than we can predict at this point. There is no excuse for apathy. The price of apathy is way too high. The most effective and quite possibly only SOS we can send to the world is a 2018 election cycle that rejects Trump and what he stands for. As the world watches, we need to show them without question that we did not choose this and we never will.
If you’re wondering how to get involved today, I highly recommend checking out this site: Post Cards to Voters.
We can’t send out that SOS, but we can send out postcards. Doing something usually feels better than doing nothing while the house burns down.
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Lisa Hayes, The Love Whisperer, is an LOA Relationship Coach. She helps clients leverage Law of Attraction to get the relationships they dream about and build the lives they want. Lisa is the author of the newly released hit book, Score Your Soulmate and How to Escape from Relationship Hell and The Passion Plan.
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