Shattered lives

Last Sunday morning, Jimmy Collins died at the age of 74.

Will Leitch, in his weekly newsletter, discusses the life and the lies of Jimmy Collins. He tells the story of Deon Thomas and Bruce Pearl and how one lie changed the trajectory of one person’s entire life. Pearl’s lie cost Collins more than just a chance at becoming the University of Illinois head men’s basketball coach. It practically destroyed him.

That was one lie, just one, just one opportunistic moment from someone who had only his own interests in mind and didn’t care what happened to anyone else because he wanted what he wanted. And that lie affected lives forever. Thirty years later, a man died full of regrets and unfulfilled dreams, with his reputation still bleeding, all because of that one lie. One lie can change everything. One lie can destroy an entire life.

He then smartly pivots to what might happen when we are subjected to thousands of lies.

What do thousands of lies do? What does an endless parade of lies, a cascading cavalcade of lies, just an eternal stream of bullshit … what does that do? I would love to believe that—while we will look back at this time with sadness, anger, frustration and despair—we will in fact be able to look back upon it. Because to look back upon it will mean that it is over.

 

I would love to believe that it will be a dark, awful period in a history, sure, but one we can tie up and place neatly away, in some storage space where we can hide from it, claim it’s something we can all move on from. I would love to believe that at some point we’ll be finished with it.

 

But I’m worried that’s not how any of this works. The results of the lies, the ramifications of this time, will reverberate for the rest of our lives, and surely the rest of our children’s lives. There are people who were destroyed by this time, by these people, who will never recover. It will be 30 years in the future, as they lie dying, and they will still be thinking about what happened to them and the people they loved and the world they cared about back in 2020, the years before, how their lives were just never quite the same after that.

This is the legacy of Donald Trump and the Republican party. They should be shunned into oblivion.