I've been gone again with travel, and more travel, and still more travel via planes, trains, and automobiles. I'm home for now, though.
While away, I barely looked at the news. It is always depressingly the same: the President is a crazy person who threatens all our lives with his stupid, showy, dangerous posturing, the only certainty of which is that he times each new outrage to the daily 24-hour news cycle before moving on to the next. In the meantime, his administration guts the hard-won protections (EPA, health care, women's rights, voting rights, the social safety net for the elderly, immigrants, the poor, and the rest) that keep us functioning.
And then the white Nazi terrorists at Charlottesville, and seeing the brave students standing up against Nazis. In this country. (And the President, who uses Twitter as a flamethrower against movie stars and dictators as crazy as himself, says nothing lest he disturb his Nazi followers, but enough about that.)
How is it that random violent idiot terrorists--er, "low-information voters for Trump"--can dress in camo and patrol the streets with assault rifles, which we're not allowed to call assault rifles officially because the NRA has a fit, as if this is a normal thing to do?
And, while we're at it, why can't the CDC track gun violence as a public health issue, which it definitely is? And why is concealed carry in classrooms permitted in ten states? (Wait! I know the answer to that one, and I'll bet you do, too.)
People are being raked over the coals on Twitter for asking questions like "how did we come to this?" and "what can we do?" so I won't ask those.
But I do think about people of my parents' generation, the older ones of whom fought in World War II. A close family member was a pilot and flew during the D-Day invasion and the Battle of Remagen. Other families have heard stories from Holocaust survivors. Did we really go through all that to have Nazis here in this country?
I know that the U.S. has a fraught history of racism and isn't close to perfect. But we are better than this and need to show it.
3 comments:
I ask the same questions, and the silence is deafening. I open my computer every day with the thought: what new idiocy has he committed that will start WW3? Are we at war yet?
Belle, I wonder the same thing every day. As long as he keeps being distracted by things like insufficient love & respect from movie stars, he can be kept from harming others quite as much. If they could just get someone to show him shiny things every day and keep his hand away from the nuclear button, we might be able to get away without WW3.
I'm terrified at wondering what "rock bottom" will be for this administration.
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