Situation normal all screwed up (SNASU).  Police officers across America continue to kill Black citizens, Black citizens are beginning to kill more police officers, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump continues to spout words of divisiveness and hate, Republicans who in the past could be depended upon to be statesmen and do the right thing have put away their moral compasses and are supporting him for the sake of party unity despite their terrifying thoughts that if he wins the odds are extremely high that – based on countless examples from his campaign thus far – he could ruin America.  One can only hope that this putting away of moral compasses is just temporary.

On the flip side of the coin, Democrats are still squabbling and complaining about how they do not trust Hillary Clinton so they are struggling with deciding whether or not to vote for her and some of Senator Bernie Sanders’ supporters have even said that they will vote for Donald Trump.  Many Democrats – and likely the great majority of Republicans, are angry because she was not criminally indicted for her email fiasco and so are saying that they will not vote for her.

In the meantime, national polls are showing that these two presumptive nominees are in a virtual tie with regard to who would win the general election if it were held at the time of their polling.  For those who believe what Hillary Clinton has said about Donald Trump, and what Mr. Trump’s 16 Republican opponents said about him before they dropped out of the race to become president; which, was that he is unqualified and unfit to hold the office of President of the United States, that is a scary thought.

While congress continues to be inept at governing, America is becoming more polarized every day and the country is slowly falling apart.  Congress’s solution?  Let’s take a vacation.  They have left Washington and will not return until after Labor Day.  To make things worse, I read an article in Politico recently that said that the Senate was on track to work the fewest number of days in 60 years.  For far too long now, we have been paying our elected officials to do nothing more than vacation from their responsibilities.  The question is, if to vacation is their only job, why do we need them and why do we continue to pay them with tax dollars derived in large part from hardworking everyday Americans?

How can those elected officials who are supposed to be leading us take their responsibility to lead so lightly?  What have things come to in America when our politicians seem to feel that their greatest responsibility to their constituents is to get reelected?  Whatever happened to statesmanship and country first in American politics?

It does no good for an out of work politician like 2016 also ran presidential candidate Jeb Bush to write an op-ed stating that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump does not represent the future of the country or the GOP, lightly brush over his faults and then, as usual, blame everything that has gone wrong and is continuing to go wrong in America and the world on President Obama and the Democrats.  And just like with Jeb Bush’s op-ed, what former Republican U.S Treasury Secretary and chief executive of Goldman Sacs Henry M. Paulson Jr. penned is almost just as ineffective.  Although he was more open in the article that he wrote about the havoc that Mr. Trump is likely to wreak if he is elected president, says that he will not vote for him and tells his fellow Republicans that it is now time to put country first, he too then goes on to blame President Obama and the Democrats for America’s problems.  The implication in his article is, oh, if we could just get a ‘real’ Republican (anyone other than Donald Trump) into office, America and the world would instantly become better and everything in it would be hunky-dory.

To continue to ignore the deterioration of our country in the hopes that the bad things will eventually go away on their own is ludicrous.  To bury our heads in the sand like this and refuse to acknowledge our faults when it comes to the ugly and despicable parts of American democracy will not fix our problems.  Instead, it has fostered the problems of divisiveness that we are now witnessing in our country.

We are all angry and mainly out of fear are tempted to separate into groups of those who look like us and protect “our” interest.  Rhetoric like that that we are hearing from Donald Trump is meant to stoke those fears.  Mr. Trump knows exactly what he is doing!  He is doing whatever it takes to be elected as president of the United States of America.  It does not matter to him that he is ripping America apart because, as usual, everything is all about Donald Trump.  Even if he does not truly espouse all of the divisive things that he is saying and has no intention of implementing them because he intends to put the country back together again after he is elected, should that happen; it could easily happen that he will find himself left with a “humpty dumpty” situation and America will suffer irreparable damage as a result.

There are far too many of those in America – Democrats and Republicans, those who range from the far left to the far right in their politics, people of all colors and ethnicities and males and females who are reasonable and have always managed to work together in the past to allow anyone to ruin that; especially someone as shallow and whose motives are as obvious as those of Mr. Trump.  I can’t recall which of our elected officials in Washington it was who said it recently but he said that if we decide to move forward with this eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth approach to America’s problems, we will ultimately be a blind and toothless nation.

It is understandable that those of us who do not hold elected office are all angry and frustrated right now but it is imperative that we stop, take a deep breath, regain our composure and attack America’s problems head-on with reasonable and well thought out rationale.  We must expect and demand this of ourselves if we are to demand it from those who hold elected office.  Once we get our own house in order then we can effectively demand the same thing of our elected officials because each of us will be able to effectively use the power of their vote as a means to reward those officials who respond appropriately and punish those who do not.

Your vote counts.  So whether you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent, always remember, your vote is the most important one of all…unless you don’t use it!

Eulus Dennis – author, Operation Rubik’s Cube and Living Between The Line