Okay, I’m officially starting to worry about the divisive nature of U.S. politics. Just today Trump reached out to Israel to encourage them to ban two U.S. Congresswomen from coming to their country. That is a hot mess. Consider the coverage of the action from here and here. Can you tell which is the pro-Trump engine? Then his state department went and did this. Seriously, we are pandering to such a degree to the big interests and powers that this present administration looks a lot like the administration in Charlize Theron’s Longshot. This is just getting stupid now.
Okay, I’m about to rant…
Look, we are supposed to be a country that is comfortable with disagreement–that wants to hear the other side, and make a need-based decision that is built up from shared interests yet allows us the independence to localize policy to fit our local demographic. That demographic shifts from place to place and shouldn’t be representative of all of America, because there IS NO all of America outside of the very idea of what we as a country are supposed to stand for. Even that has become highly divisive. Give us your tired and poor? Not so much for this iteration of the federal government. Most of it feels driven by fear–fear of racial dilution and an overt loss of the white majority. That is simply inevitable. Globally.
Deal with it. Accept that white is not the higher power and move towards a stance where equality is something we actually want or define class and social stratification by a different medium than the color of your skin. That starts by establish beauty by different standards than the color of your skin and length and texture of your hair. Once we start down that road–which we have–the rest is inevitable.
What we are witnessing is the blowback to the reality of the inevitable. The old and the power rich are realizing that their grip is slipping, and nobody wants to let power go. Those who felt they could one day become powerful are recognizing that this dream is not so much inevitable as it is improbable and that too is hard to accept. This is what change looks like. This is what blowback to that change looks like.
We need to start growing up fast as a nation before we make such a mess that we cannot clean up.