I’m not the only one
freaking out:
Catchy new tagline. |
I’m just very disturbed
at how faithfully Orange Julius is following the authoritarian playbook. The scapegoating of particular
religious, ethnic, and non-heterosexual people, for instance, was an old
standby for another thin-skinned dude who liked to yell and had bad hair. (Ok, you caught me. I’m not above a Hitler-Trump
comparison.) NEWS ALERT: Muslims
aren’t killing us by the thousands (guns are), Mexicans aren’t stealing our
jobs (automation is), and transsexuals aren’t grabbing your daughter’s pussy in
the women’s room (she should watch out for our President though). Picking on minority groups and the
vulnerable may make some (miserable) people feel better, but it does not solve
problems. It actually creates them.
Stop me if I sound crazy.
Oh right, you can’t.
Here’s a problem created
by the dogwhistling and hateful rhetoric that spewed from the Trump campaign,
and now spews from the White House:
In case your preferred news source didn't cover this, vandals desecrated 100 graves at a historic Jewish cemetery in St. Louis this week. |
As it turns out, bad
people are empowered to do bad things when we do not actively embrace tolerance
and respect, when we elect people who do not actively embrace tolerance and
respect.
One of the most moving
places I have ever been is the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. For over 300 years, it was the only
place the city’s Jewish people were allowed to bury their dead. The graves are stacked layers upon layers, making “ground level” something like thirty feet above the current
street. Up to 100,000 people may be buried there. Seeing these graves all crammed together sparked a major
understanding in my brain when I visited with my family a few years ago. The
Nazis didn’t cook up anti-Semitism in the 1930s—it was hundreds and hundreds of
years in the making. Passive
cruelty and episodic violence were the norms. Europe was so primed with anti-Semitism that it required
just one particularly evil man to twist prejudice into holocaust.
Photos can't really capture this place. |
I’m not saying Donald
Trump is plotting to murder all the groups he recklessly scapegoats. But I am saying he is too cozy with
authoritarian methods of exploiting fear and prejudice. People like David Duke, Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, and cowardly grave vandals should not feel encouraged by the President of the United States. But they do.
I’m still hopeful our nation's history has primed us to love and defend freedom. But I fear this slippery slope we’re on. I love you, America, but I don’t like
you a whole lot right now. We need to open our
eyes to reality. Democracy dies in
darkness.
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