Take off the headphones

I'm responding to the editorial cartoon in the Aug. 8 Chicago Tribune. Trump and Uncle Sam are in a car sailing over a cliff in an effort to escape nonexistent communists.

I watched a live performance of the Rolling Stones recently. I'm a big fan of the Stones and have been since “Satisfaction” came out. But they always seemed diminished live: less polished, and I can't reconcile Mick Jaggers’ onstage antics with, well, anything. He looks like someone threw him off a building and he's clawing the air in a vain attempt to regain altitude.

Republicans are like that. They are clawing to regain an imperial federal government. They want to have power concentrated in the hands of the few. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, they want to (desperately) keep their phony-baloney jobs. No amount of immorality concerns them. Do unto others is not their concern. They just want to secure their cushy seats of power regardless of the consequences.

They want to milk their positions for everything they can get. Ergo, the Trump sycophancy. The electorate supporting them is too uneducated, too greedy, or too evil to look in the mirror.

Many Democrats are the same, but at least they feign some allegiance to protecting the environment, helping poor folks, addressing inequality and improving the health of the nation.

Most of the rest of us just want to put on headphones and listen to the Stones at jet engine decibels. Trump is our political crossroads. Climate is our live-or-die crossroads. Inequality is our economic crossroads. Choosing the lesser of two evils is a matter of freedom's survival. We have to take off the headphones.

Jim Arneberg, Hoffman Estates