This is How They Do It

The usual suspects -- those talking head pundits who people the airwaves (and cable waves and net verse) -- have been scratching their collective heads at how low some folks will go. Ever since the Barr-Muller report was concocted they've asked how it is that so many people with previously unsullied characters could befoul themselves and sully their reputations by doing Trump's immoral bidding.

Well kiddos, it's not that complicated. People who permit others to calibrate their moral compasses generally don't have a compass that functions.

Sure, they've been able to slide through their privileged lives unscathed by the criminal record they'd be saddled with were they born poor and Black or brown.

Sure, mommy and daddy made sure they got the best educations bribery could buy.

Sure, they learned to color within the lines, cheat acceptably and hide behind their righteous facades.

But when your morality is never truly challenged, when going along to get along is good enough to keep your reputation intact, you don't know where your "do not cross" line lies.

So you wonder how so many people could go from upstanding political operatives to sycophants beholden to a corrupt wannabe dictator? The same way weak people have always permitted those intent on doing evil to have their way.

How have despots throughout time trampled the wills of enablers willing to pave the way for untold atrocities? How have the death squads and the camps and the genocides been carried out all over the world since the beginning of time?

Not because those terrible people from faraway countries or distant past were immoral, awful people and we are not. But because as long as we excuse, overlook, explain away or rationalize unethical, immoral and wrongful behavior, we condone it.

Let us hope that our heirs will look back on this time, and wonder how so many people could be so hateful, bigoted, divisive and destructive. Let us hope they ask how so many people could show such disregard for human dignity.

Let us hope they look back on us with pity and dismay -- and once again pledge never again.