It’s mostly a failure of leadership. A failure to grasp reality, make a plan of action, and then follow through. An inability to look beyond one’s own petty priorities and look outward to a greater good. Yeah…all of that. But also, an unwillingness to steer people with a tendency toward laissez faire to a people willing to succumb to a stricter government involvement in their lives.

The last and only time I got a flu shot was when I was in the military. I found it to be such an incredible infringement on my personal freedom to be forced to succumb to a vaccination that I chose to resist all future offers. And that is some of the difficulty we see now. We still view ourselves as a romanticized Wild West, free bird character who tells “the man” to go screw himself while collecting social security.

We are such adolescents. Totally invested in immediate gratification, we do not plan, and even worse, we refuse to admit that we are not the center of the universe. We act like entitled, selfish assholes with no regard for anyone but ourselves. And we think we’re smarter than the other guy, whoever that guy is standing in the way of something we want or keeping us from going someplace we want to go.

Vegas can be the epicenter of Wild West thinking. Equal parts hedonism and greed with a healthy dose of screw you, I’ll do what I want and anything goes. But always a sense of hope and an over exaggerated sense of wit and talent. Vegas welcomes you. Yet Vegas is attractive for all the reasons that now threaten to be our undoing. It’s not our fault.

Trump reminds us daily that we are where we are for reasons that are not our fault. Like an addict being steered toward rehab, it’s a disease and it’s not your fault. But the goal of rehab is to get the addict free of their drug of choice. Trump, however, doesn’t seem to have a Twelve Step program and seems disinclined to steer us away from our addictions. What have you got to lose?

In the history of the world, and we know Trump is a scholar of history, nobody has done more or done it better than he has. He is the embodiment of us and until we hit rock bottom, take a cold hard look inward, and make the decision to get clean and sober, we will continue to listen to the adolescent in chief and buy his shit weed.

What have you got to lose