Title: The Book Thief
Author: Markus Zusac
Published:  2005

Relevant. Thanks Donald Trump, you shitty, shitty human being.

The young man wandered around for quite some time, thinking, planning, and figuring out exactly how to make the world his. Then one day, our of nowhere, it struck him-the perfect plan. He’d seen a mother walking with her child. At one point, she admonished the small boy, until finally, he began to cry. Within a few minutes, she spoke very softly to him, after which he was soothed and even smiled.

The young man rushed to the woman and embraced her. “Words!” He grinned.

“What?”

But there was no reply, He was already gone.

Yes, the Fuhrer decided that he would rule the world with words. “I will  never fire a gun,” he devised. “I will not have to.” Still, he was not rash. Let’s allow him at least that much. He was not a stupid man at all. His first plan of attach was to plant the words in as many areas of his homeland as possible.

He planted them day and night, and cultivated them.

He watched them grow, until eventually, great forests of words had risen through Germany…. It was a nation of farmed thoughts.

While the words were growing, our young Fuhrer also planted seeds to create symbols, and these, too, were well on their way to full bloom. Now the time had come. The Fuhrer was ready.

He invited his people toward his own glorious heart, beckoning them with his finest, ugliest words, handpicked from his forests. And the people came.

They were all placed on a conveyor belt and run through a rampant machine that gave them a lifetime in ten minutes. Words were fed into them. Time disappeared and they now Knew everything they needed to know. They were hypnotized. – The Book Thief

I’m sure Hitler really enjoyed his freedom of speech. We have to believe one of two things, but they both cannot be true at once. Either words are power and freedom of speech needs to be carefully monitored and considered, or words are powerless and freedom of speech isn’t important. But I see people want to lay claim to both. They hide behind freedom of speech while throwing their hate words and simultaneously suggest words are not power when asked to to be accountable. Check out this for more on this topic.

The young man was a Nazi; his father was not. In the opinion of Hans Junior, his father was part of an old, decrepit Germany-one that allowed everyone else to take it for the proverbial ride while its own people suffered. – The Book Thief

Make America great again. What does that mean, exactly? Donald Trump actually answered this question and said it’s the boom years during WWII. Trump seems to identify this time period for economic reasons-which I think is past and will stay that way mostly due to robotics and other ways in which manufacturing will require less and less labor while maintaining or increasing productivity-back to my main point. But Americans interpret that based on their age. And this phrase allows people to coddle their irrational nostalgia for some time in the past that they perceive to be better in some way than now.

I think many Trump supporters do not interpret this first as an economic statement. I believe they interpret it first culturally. That’s the root where some of the racist and sexist portions of his following comes from, the basket of deplorables, so to speak. They are thinking of a time when blacks and women knew their place. They are thinking of a time when men with no education could hold unilateral power over women and minorities. Let me repeat that statement in a slightly different way, a time when white men with zero achievement or intelligence could wield power simply by being born.

That time is at its end. White men for the most part are going down swinging. And we have to watch it. And it’s painful.

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate. – The Book Thief

Reading this book about a child caught up in Nazi Germany was painfully relevant. I have had this theory for years, that we all have the capacity to be Germans in 1939. I just didn’t think I would live to see concrete evidence of it during my lifetime.