Not-my-president Donald Trump has selected several individuals for posts within his
administration that stand behind the alt-right movement. Let’s be honest,
alt-right is nothing more than a sugar coated way of saying white
supremacy. Except this time it’s more loud and proud than it has been
since Jim Crow was the law of the land. Whether you believe that Trump is
a racist or a white supremacist is inconsequential. What I urge you to
recognize is that, through his rhetoric and actions, Trump has made white
supremacy okay again. People finally feel comfortable publicly using hate
speech. I have to wonder how many people heard that he wants to ‘make
America great again’ and DIDN’T realize he meant returning to the America that
burned crosses on people’s lawns.
Someday our children
and grandchildren will study this version of America and wonder how we allowed
it to happen. They’ll wonder why we stood by and watched as hordes of
Mexicans were deported, Muslims were placed behind barbed wire in internment
camps, and gays were beaten and killed to prevent them from polluting society
with their fiendish predilections. Future generations won’t understand
how anyone could become so apathetic. They will question, but we will not
have answers. At least not good ones.
Let me take you back a
bit to help you understand.
It’s important to
remember the state that Germany was in during the decades following WWI.
The country was decimated. People were left homeless, jobless, and
desperate. Hitler came to power by promising the people good jobs and
economic prosperity. He was charismatic and touted a renewed sense of
nationalism. He made people feel hope that the Germany they loved could
be restored to its former glory. One could almost say he promised to ‘make
Germany great again’. The people were willing to believe anything he told
them. So when Hitler said that the depression was the Jews fault they
shrugged and went along with it. They allowed themselves to believe it
was because of the dirty Jews that they were starving. And Hitler didn’t
just make promises. He backed them up. Within a relatively short
period of time white Protestant German citizens found themselves in comfortable
jobs with good homes, great schools, and plenty of food to go around. So
they ignored the camps with barbed wire. They shrugged things off as
their neighbors were relocated at gunpoint to ghettos. They tuned out the
whistles and clacking of trains headed for work camps. They embraced it
actually. After all, the Jews brought it on themselves. Dirty Jews.
In the spring of 1945
allied troops liberated work camps established by the Nazi regime. They
were horrified by what they saw. They couldn’t believe the vast number of
dead. They were astonished that humans could be so sickly and emaciated
but still living. They didn’t understand how anyone could allow such
horrific conditions to exist. U.S.
military leaders decided that there needed to be accountability amongst the
people. Nazi officers were already being arrested and held for committing
war crimes, but the Americans also blamed the complacency of German citizens
for allowing genocide. By late May U.S. troops began gathering German
civilians from all the towns surrounding Nazi camps and forced them to tour the
decrepit camps. G.I.’s stood guard as townspeople filed past mounds of
bodies in various states of decay. Women held handkerchiefs to their
noses to block the pungent stench of death. Some vomited. Others
fainted. After the tour they asked the civilians how they could allow it
to happen in their own backyards. Most claimed ignorance. They said
they didn’t know; that they had been lied to. The few brave enough to
admit that they knew excused it by saying, “What could we do? We were afraid we’d
be next.” They were also ashamed to admit, even to themselves, that they
were part of the machine that put Hitler into power in the first place.
Today we are dealing
with an all-too-familiar scenario. Our
illustrious leader is calling for the rounding up of “undesirables” and punishing
states that refuse to comply. He
whole-heartedly believes that torture absolutely works despite all his military
advisers assuring him that it doesn’t. He wants a wall to separate the good,
patriotic American public from the scum on the other side.
Beyond that, our new leader
has even attacked us, his constituents. He
has called for censorship of the sciences and eliminated the arts as being
frivolous. He decides what the media can
report and rages when those reports are unflattering. This is all part of establishing extreme
nationalism and creating enemies for other white Christians to blame.
So. How will we
explain the next 4 years to generations to come? How will we justify the
degradation of anyone who isn’t a white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon male? How
will we justify our own hate crimes? Will we say that we didn’t know; that
we had been lied to? Will we shrug and ask what could we have done?
These are very real questions that history will look back and ask us. And
as of yet I don’t have an answer.
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