-Adolf Hitler
It is likely that everything I will write in this brief commentary has already been said. I share it only for the purpose of solidarity with those who have felt it and said it before. You’re not alone.
How is it that we can “Make America Great Again”? What unravels before us daily is the loss of any gains we had made in civility, as empathy and good manners take drive-through short cuts for the least inconvenience of time wasted on human connection and interaction. We have shopping to do, or three jobs to get the rent paid, or a Netflix binge awaiting next to the bowl of chips. The demise of human interaction, aliteracy, and jargon that interrupt intimate conversations, converge to collude with our creation of Donald Trump and his rabid determination to Make America Hate Again.
Great Again? This implies that it was indeed once great. I do not equate having the “strongest” military on earth with greatness. A military-industrial complex that thrives on the altruism and/or economic despair of its frontline armed forces,(many from economically oppressed communities who see no other way out of poverty) that sends home soldiers with heroic hearts and damaged minds to empty refrigerators and sub-rate medical care, to be forgotten and discarded, is not great. A nation that believes “discovery” is equal to pillaging and taking by force what has previously existed and thrived in the care of others, is a nation in need of a new vocabulary, with an emphasis on historical etymology.
A nation that savagely attempted to decimate 500 First Nations and forced their children into “Christian” schools with brutal practices of assimilation and cultural rape, was not a great nation. A nation that views First Nations Peoples as past tense, is not great. A nation that rounded up American citizens that were of Japanese descent and corralled them into concentration camps, was not great; a nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world that distinguishes itself with corporately owned prison labor camps and has one of the worst educational systems that help to feed those prisons, was and is, not great.
The romanticized 1950’s when women were equated with steerage and servitude. Not great. A time when we needed a national campaign geared towards children (“Give a Hoot; Don’t Pollute") so they would stop the adults from trashing the rural, suburban and urban landscapes, with garbage that was even thrown from car windows with impunity. Yes, there was a time in the United States when throwing bags of garbage onto public properties, parks and landscapes was normalized. Nothing great about it.
Yes, we bought and sold human beings; the Black body was once monetary currency. It is now currency for a New Hate, that isn’t new at all; it is simply getting consent to rise again, out in the open, guns blazing.
The violence of sex trafficking of women and children is escalating. You can even find it in Palo Alto, minutes from Stanford University.
The Tuskegee Syphillis Experiments from 1932-1972. Not great.
The decades of forced sterilization of one-third of Puerto Rican women on their colonized island. Not great.
The even more recent forced sterilizations of incarcerated and poor women in the U.S. Not great.
The list goes on. Monstrous.
We do not adequately protect the rights of children, their safety, their education, nor their food. The U.S. is the only country that hasn’t ratified the Convention on Children's Rights. Great? Homelessness a block away from affluence does not say Great to me either.
When I see the Democratic Party signage that states Love Trumps Hate, I cringe and wonder how many people realize that the words subliminally connect Trump to Love, not Hate. This slogan, and all who accept it without question or concern, serves to underscore our predilection for sound bites, soothing to the collective mental fog of a country in a state of PTSD, where war criminals who defied the will of the people still walk free.
Perhaps if we call things what they are, with words and facts and non-revisionist history, with clear minds, distancing ourselves for a moment from the influences that contaminate our thinking rather than inform it, perhaps if we can move beyond the sound bite, we can take a bite of truth out of the sound. The evidence is in, over and over again: Trump is Hate.
Now, here’s the hard part, how have we become a nation that has allowed him to rise to such a level of power that he may become the next President of the United States? What have we become and why?
In the meantime, remember to vote. Netflix can wait.