The thing is… and this is a weird ‘thing, even when compared to most of my ‘things’… but the thing is that we were all lured into a false sense of reality. We mistook political correctness for actual progress. We thought we had trained, using nothing more than social pressure, our bigots and haters into no longer being bigoted and hateful. Now we can see how wrong we were.
They didn’t go away. They didn’t get reformed. They didn’t get more open-minded. They just got good at not saying hateful and bigoted things out loud.
Now, along comes Trump… and he comes right out and says hateful and bigoted things against all kinds of groups… women, minorities, entire races, people of different sexual orientations and so on, and the crowd goes wild.
Well, you better be looking at that crowd at the republican debates, America. Because that is you. It is your ugly, stinking underbelly that resides down in the swamp of human indifference and self-righteousness… and you can try to explain it away by saying that it is the smaller part of you, but icebergs and alligators don’t work like that. The part that basks in the sun and therefore becomes enlightened isn’t the vast majority… it is, at best half, and at worst… less than that.
You can tell yourself that these are just fringe whackos… people with chips on their shoulders, the leftover, dying breed of dinosaurs that are slowly becoming extinct, but how sure are you really? Because they come from all walks of life, every socioeconomic level, and all parts of this country. They are your neighbors and they are your own family. And you can’t change their minds. You can try, and create rifts that will tear your family apart, but that won’t do it. That won’t stop them from thinking they are right.
And America, like one, big dysfunctional family, is being torn apart too. Politics has been replaced by obstructionism. Debate had been overshadowed by pompous proclamation. Compromise has become ultimatum. State’s rights are now a platform for taking rights away from people.
Free speech is not an excuse for fear mongering. Religion is not a pulpit from which to preach intolerance.
And the fact that these people can rant about family values while claiming that only they can define what a family is, or cynically ignore the fact that the constitution is there to separate church and state while using religion… the very religion they all ignore when it gets in the way of their goals, mind you… to stir people into a frenzy of ‘us against them’, is just wrong in every sense of the word.
Yes, I get your anger, I understand your frustration. Politicians have ruined this country in so many ways. The process is broken. The way forward is not clear. But is you feel you need to show the establishment how angry and frustrated you are, can’t you at least find someone who isn’t full of hate? Hate isn’t going to fix the problems. Hate is going to get us into worse problems.
My My wife and I walked down the beach as the sky began to lighten.
