(THE NATION)
By Harold Pollack
My greatest fear, when I ponder going to jail, is that my 53-year-old prostate wouldn’t be able to handle the long wait until I am booked. Before Election Day, it seemed a little crazy to imagine that I would ever be behind bars. Now it seems a little crazy that the country would be where we are. Like many others, I am weighing what I am willing and able to do in response.
Henry David Thoreau begins his 1849 essay On the duty of civil disobedience with a timely question: “This American government—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but in each instant losing some of its integrity?” American government lost more than some of its integrity on November 8, when Donald Trump was elected to succeed Barack Obama as President of the United States.
Donald Trump is the most comprehensively unworthy President-Elect in generations. His mere venial sins astonish: His grifting business practices, exemplified by the $25 million settlement against Trump University, his tabloid affairs, the crude personal insults he hurls at critics and political opponents, his disdain for the craft of policymaking, exemplified by his failure to attend national security briefings. I’m not even mentioning his relationship to Putin.
