|
America in 2019: Can we survive the Social and Political Destruction of the Age of Trump? Published for public media October 29, 2019.
"When the president of a country speaks, its citizens generally listen. Particularly in moments of crisis, grief and uncertainty. They listen because they require and deserve direction, understanding, comfort, and to make sense out of a chaotic, dangerous and sometimes terrifying world. We try to find comfort as a nation from the great communicators of the world. Orators like President Roosevelt with his “Fireside chats” disseminated via Old Time Radio, back when radio was the first broadcast medium became the glue that connected Americans to each other and to their president. And of course Orators like President Obama. And the people listened. During President Obama’s many speeches from his two terms in office, he demonstrated that it was the power of language that became his greatest asset in influencing, comforting and providing perspective for a confused and troubled America. President Roosevelt and President Obama never failed in their ability to connect with people and gain their collective trust. They were thoughtful, intelligent and dedicated men during their presidencies, proving again and again how much they truly cared about the American people. Now fast forward to 2019: Decades from now, after listening to nearly three years of endless and painstakingly documented lies from a man constitutionally incapable of being truthful, I will remember most how Mr. Donald Trump normalized corruption. With his pathological lying, profane crudeness, childish mean-spiritedness, incivility and petty viciousness, with his coarse insults, his bizarre rhetoric, his irrational equivocations and his careless hypocrisy, Trump normalized amoral conduct. We’ve all seen the countless world leaders who have turned away at televised meetings, embarrassed for Trump and his numerous errors. Errors either pertaining to how to pronounce a name correctly, or a numerical error or a reference to ancient history that was so completely off sometimes these leaders would chuckle or even roll their eyes. I will remember how easily certain Americans embraced Mr. Trump’s example and adopted his unbalanced and self-destructive approach, glorifying social exclusion and division at the cost of any credibility to their reputation. As his alliances crumble and his power evaporates, we are shown the face and troubled mind of a barely literate man. Compulsive, neurotic and filled with a self loathing that expresses itself through transparent projection of his faults onto whomever he can verbally assault within his midst, Trump reveals himself daily. Trump’s followers mimic his bullying tactics and praise his language of division, sexism, racism and hatred because they have nothing else in their life that makes them feel important. They are primarily white and low income, and they are primarily men. They lack even the common sense to understand that when one walks with toilet tissue stuck to their shoe and onto a plane, past countless people, and even the secret service, and no one tells them? They must be held in some kind of universal contempt. In Trump’s America, I will remember how kindness became weakness, how civility became stupid and a waste of time, how compassion, decency or empathy for others was mocked and rejected. I will remember how Trump and his crook cronies embraced every form of depravity and deformity of character, while also breaking countless laws and winding up in prison one after the other. Moreover, I will remember the confused musings and sometimes the online hysteria of men and women wondering how someone like Trump could ever be elected the leader of the free world in the first place. It’s easy to perceive the abject fear in their words and in their despair. I’ve read the alarming social media posts of people who say they should commit suicide, feeling that this current crisis in American government will never end, that America is doomed and that Trump is unstoppable. I’ve tried to console people like this, and remind them that Trump will of course NOT prevail. As a mortal man, he is NOT unstoppable. Men like Trump can never run from the corruption and self-loathing that defines who they are and which ultimately destroys them. Despite writing this short commentary, I’m not a political person. There are countless aspects to American politics, economics and finance that I’ll just never understand. But I do know the difference between right and wrong. I know who I stand with and who I support and I know why I stand with them and support them. What I have personally learned from the Age of Trump is that there was a festering wound that had been allowed to grow in American society and it remained hidden for a long while. Even after our first black president was elected that wound remained hidden and continued to putrefy and spread. The wound is called Racism. And it is Racism that will define Trumps time in the White House more than anything else. It is Trump’s inherent racism that has devastated families, tearing them apart and has made orphans of brown children, some of them mere babies. It is Trump’s racism that has allowed the Kurds, once our allies, to be betrayed and abandoned by America and later slaughtered by the ethnocentric and intolerant Turkish government. It is Trump’s racism that has allowed the desertion of Puerto Rico during a devastating hurricane but not before blaming the citizens of Puerto Rico for a natural disaster they had absolutely no control over." Theresa Griffin-Kennedy-Dupay
|
And we do not have to take this kind of abuse any longer.
