Today I saw a piece in the Washington Post that was a heart-warming story of one person helping another for the simple reason that they wanted to. A woman with two children was alerted to the fact that her car was on fire by a neighbor. It had been targeted by an arsonist. A person in the same town heard about the incident on the news. He had just purchased a new car and now had a spare. He contacted the police department, got in touch with the woman and simply gave her the car.

Yesterday a friend in the town where I live told me that the night before she had seen a small black dog in the middle of what is normally a very busy street. She pulled over and coaxed the dog into her car. She, along with another friend, began posting on social media and in short order had the dog re-united with a large family that were out on the streets searching for her.

There are many, many more stories like these all over our country and actually all over the world. The real nature of people, the vast majority of people, is to help others—for no other reason than to help. It isn’t something transactional or something to keep in a mental ledger. There is a personal satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that goes with rendering unrequested help. But even that is not what is about. It is simply the right thing to do when one is able to do so. This is what good people do—social people, normal people, everyday folks.

The Post and other publications would be wise to report many more of these stories. They represent to majority of us rather than the other side of humanity’s tracks.

Meanwhile, if one listens to the rambling complaints about America coming from Donald Trump and his camp—and worse, believes them—it is a wonder anyone leaves their front door. The picture Trump attempts to conjure is of an America under siege by vast hordes of armed immigrants charging across our borders and laying waste to the country side. We are to believe that if you go outside without an AR-15 and as many handguns as you can carry, you won’t survive a trip to Publix for a carton of eggs.

Sure there is crime in America and people are coming to our borders. But what Trump fails to mention is that crime statistics have been dropping for years. The people arriving at our borders are majorly good and decent people desperate to escape circumstances that are in many cases far worse than the fake conditions that Trump rants about here.

The thing is that Trump’s lies are terribly easy to debunk, just by simply going outside, seeing and speaking to people—any people. The vast majority of just about everyone you will meet are social, friendly and helpful. That’s the nature of humanity. The tiny minority of people are the criminals. They are out there for sure, but simple observation of their actions makes them not that hard to keep your distance from. The criminals and the truly insane are a small fraction of the population. Trump and his fan club want us to think—and act—otherwise.

Criminals feed off the unsuspecting and the gullible to make their “living.” And that fully describes the newly coronated Republican presidential candidate. For the first time in the nearly 2 and a half centuries of our Democracy a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist and factual traitor has been nominated for the highest office.

There are many obvious things that crooks do:

• Blame law enforcement for their problems.
• Rant about the unfairness of courts.
• Assume the posture of victims.
• Accuse others of the criminal acts they have just committed or are attempting to commit.

If people don’t see these traits in Trump, his rhetoric and actions, they aren’t looking—or they don’t care, or think they stand to gain in some way.

There is so much hand-wringing going on in the Democratic establishment right now that even if you’re not involved in it, your hands are starting to feel chafed. The problems Dems are fretting over are one hundred percent self-inflicted. The last thing anyone should have expected from Donald Trump was for him to engage in a debate. He never intended to and probably can’t define the word. Trump’s behavior over the past nine years should have been a tiny clue.

If you put a social person into a one-on-one interaction with an anti-social psychotic, well you saw the result. So now the entire Democratic side is wrapping itself around a mental telephone pole of a “what do we do now?” While the “law and order” party has coalesced to back a criminal.

Does this make any sense to anyone? Here’s the crux of the problem: anti-social people, criminals and psychotics try to create the impression that they are inevitable and there is nothing you can do about it except knuckle under and bend the knee. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The true nature of these people—and this applies to Trump, Stone, Flynn, Bannon, the Mercers, Murdoch, Alex Jones, Vance, Musk, Thiel and the rest of these fascist wannabes—is that they are tiny, fragile, damaged souls. They are terrified to their core of the rest of humanity—the veritable ocean of good people out in the world. And that fear rules their internal world.

We are supposed to feel apathetic and bow down to the inevitable King Trump and his Vice-King Vance. And allow them to deport millions, get revenge and retribution on their enemies, give Ukraine and then the rest of Europe to Putin while turning the rest of the government from one that was ours to their instrument of rule.

I for one do not feel apathetic. I get pissed off when someone tries to con me. I know I am not alone. The vast majority of people in the world object to criminals trying to put one over on them. That is why laws against criminality were written, and police departments and courts were created—to protect the rest of society from them. And why we have elections.

As much as Donald Trump and the former Republican Party hate the idea, we still have our vote. It is a powerful instrument. So much so that these people have expended massive effort to make us think that our votes don’t matter, unless they win, of course.

As the great American Western novelist Louis L’Amour once wrote: “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”

He also wrote: “There’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps a-coming.”

Both are an excellent inspiration for what we need to do this November.