I didn’t vote for President Trump but I did try to give him the benefit of the doubt once he was elected. I often held back from any real criticism simply because I thought he might very well shake up our political system in a way that would set it back on some reasonable track, away from the career politicians who have all but demolished it.
I was wrong.
President Trump continues to demonstrate no real interest in politics. He has no legislative goals other than to make certain existing laws harsher, more punishing. He is not impressed with the Republican leadership in Congress and has so far refused to be cowered by any of them. That, I do find somewhat refreshing. Those guys have ignored the country for far too long, hiding behind pretended concern, while voting and plotting to do nothing about immigration reform, police brutality, the militarization of police, Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Yemen, race relations, Israel’s merciless regime, the catastrophic refugee problems, gross economic inequality in this country, the working poor, homelessness, and well, the list is endless.
And don’t get me started on the Democrats. They hold no place of honor or respect for me, either. I’ve given up on them.
The Charlottesville protests were a clear sign that a long-held prejudice and rancid anger still resides in the hearts of some of our people; in fact, too many of them. White supremacists, the KKK, and Nazi groups do not represent any viable American value. They are hate groups. Some of them may genuinely believe they are superior to Blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities. Some may truly think the old South monuments to Civil War Confederates hold some kind of respect for them. But these are beliefs of a dying breed. The South lost the Civil War. The Confederate government was vanquished and ended. Slavery was defeated. Emancipation became law. And the Declaration of Independence made it clear that all American citizens, all of us, have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” without limits or restrictions of any kind. That means race, religion, class, rich, poor, whomever, we all have equal rights to the promises of our Constitution, to the Declaration of Independence, and to the Bill of Rights. All of us.
President Trump has fumbled the essential requirement of leadership and that is to hold the nation together in times of crisis. His rhetoric, his tweets, his news conference comments, are too often divisive, juvenile, reactive, and incendiary. There is no place for white supremacists or Nazi sympathizers in this country. These groups do not represent any mindset or standard of conduct that is in any way consistent with our core American values as stipulated in all of our national documents.
We must have a president that understands and honors this. We cannot be the “United” States of America if our leader fails to call us to live up to our best ideals and to reject any notion that skin color, or cultural mores, or religious beliefs, or economic factors, or political party, or sub-group associations suspend any of us from the responsibility to be decent Americans first and foremost. That together, we succeed, and divided we fail, utterly.
I have lived my entire life in the South. I grew up with segregation and then desegregation. I saw the meanness of prejudice in my school, in the churches I attended, in the soda shops, movie theaters, and everywhere else. The Blacks and Mexicans were not accepted as typical Americans. They were banished to their own part of town, usually run down and poverty-stricken with few city services and no one in city government interested in fairness for them. I saw this growing up and I never understood it. I still don’t. How can we treat other human beings in our own country with arrogant indifference or worse with rage and violence simply because of the color their skin or the color of ours?
Thankfully, many minorities today have a much better life and more opportunity than most of their ancestors. But it came at a great sacrifice from some courageous and intelligent and responsible leaders. Dr. King was one of the most significant and brilliant of those leaders in the country. He shamed us with his nonviolence and his beautiful words and ultimately gave his life for equal rights.
Political writer and author, Rebecca Solnit, has written in her excellent book, “Hope in the Dark,” “It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.”
We need a president and leaders who not only know how to give us those kinds of perspectives and possibilities but who want to do it, for all of us. We desperately need that hope and those openings.
© 2017 Timothy Moody
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