But there is a minority for whom this point of view seems to be irritating. For whatever reasons — religious, ideological, acquisitive, or just a simple desire to bully and dominate — they choose to foment discord with the intention of profiting from it. They attack their neighbors (tribal or national), they organize crusades and pogroms against people with different skin colors or facial characteristics or accents, they inflame whole racial populations to genocide, they try to bully anyone who doesn’t agree with their standards. Anything to stir up trouble. Out of the chaos they believe may come an opportunity to better their own status or caste, financial or political standing, or just their own narcissistic sense of satisfaction.

This seems to have been true since records began to be kept, so there is little reason to hope that it will change. All those anonymous statues and temples and pyramids and arches with the hard-to-decipher inscriptions. These nuts and screwballs can’t face the fact that once their allotted spans are finished they will be forgotten like all their predecessors. Once they acquire power, which they have acquired by means of inheritance (“the Divine right of Kings” according to the ancient chronicles, “born on third base” according to Ann Richards), or muscle (unprovoked conquest, like Alexander), or financial finagling or assassination (in countries supposedly ruled by law), or some combination of those they create nothing but problems for those of us who just want to be left in peace.

Dealing with these nuts has cost the rest of us a great deal of heartache and treasure over the millenniums. Our little blue ball has run red with the blood of those who tried to resist or just avoid being co-opted. We try to drop out as conscientious objectors, but the bullies and megalomaniacs don’t respect our desire for neutrality. They ferret us out and enlist us in their causes, whether we like it or not.

Nevertheless in the end we may be said as a species to have so far by and large succeeded. All-powerful Ozymandias’s statue was toppled on its face in the sand, Alexander eventually caught a fatal cold in Babylon, Napoleon forgot to take extra pairs of dry socks with him to Russia, and peace has always returned.

So in the long view Donald Trump is no more than a wind-blown grain of sand. He and his Medici-like family will have their day and then disappear, leaving the field to other predatory families. Peace will return. The pendulum will swing back the other way, from war to peace again. We can count on surviving. Are we not 7.6 millions? The Donald is only one.

That has always been true until now, but things have changed.

What’s different? Now we have to deal with the possibility that one of these nuts and screwballs may succeed in getting his finger on the nuclear button and there will be no next time.

Good luck to the cockroaches or the rats or whatever radiation resistant species is slated to take over next on this little blue ball.

This is a new script.

Is there anything we can do about it? 

Possibly. Since pushing the button is guaranteed suicide, that may be no deterrent for the zealots who believe that this earthly life is merely a preliminary to a more comfortable permanent existence in Paradise, or Heaven. But rational beings interested in their own survival, with or without Swiss bank accounts or palaces or golf courses, are unlikely to display as much faith in an afterlife geared to their continued perpetual enjoyment. We may be able to count on their stepping back from the edge of the precipice. 

But what if they can’t control the zealots after they have been sufficiently stirred up? Well, there is yet one more line of defense. There is something incongruous about the idea of a combination in one person of an understanding of science, a PhD in physics, and a willingness to buy into the vision of a dozen eager houris in a fountain-cooled garden, or of a vacant chair and a handshake waiting at God’s reception desk. And the button has to be wired properly by scientists to work. With all the built-in safeguards the wiring gets pretty complicated; maybe even as complicated as brain surgery. Can we hope that an unacknowledged conspiracy exists among nuclear scientists and missile technicians to sabotage the impulses of the zealots at the last moment?

So far as I can see, that may be our only hope. Otherwise I will have to start discussing with my genome surgeon the possibility of using CRSPR to transform me into a convincing replica of Gregor Samsa and hope for the best.