Close-up Of Businessman’s Hands Saving Piggybank From Hammering
The impetus behind the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is systemic racism.
People join and support BLM to protest a system of justice in America that treats people of color differently than white people. From that perspective, the BLM movement comes from noble place – the desire to right a wrong in our society.
This past Summer, the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer sparked outrage and widespread protests, deservedly so.
Rising up and taking to the streets to protest that murder was an entirely appropriate response by Americans. And, if I remember correctly, when some of those protests turned violent, that violence was condemned by democrats and republicans alike.
Most Americans agree that violent protests cannot, and should not be tolerated. That said, it’s important to understand the psychology of a riot.
Marin Luther King said:
“I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.
And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”
The BLM riots were the result of America failing to acknowledge the mistreatment of black and brown citizens by our justice system, which has been going on for years. Prolonged injustice needs but a spark to lead to protests and riots, and the George Floyd murder was that spark.
Contrast that with the January 6th “stop the steal” protest, which turned into a violent riot.
The January 6th protest had nothing to do with prolonged injustice. It was not borne out of years of systemic racism. Instead, the January 6th protest was a planned and calculated attempt by our president to disrupt the certification the 2020 presidential election.
The impetus for the January 6th protest was the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was rigged. There is not a shred of truth to that claim. But, as we all know; Donald Trump does not care about the truth. So, he pushed the false claim of a rigged and stolen election to millions of Americans in the weeks leading up to the January 6th rally. And on that day, he again lied to the thousands in attendance.
None of this is in dispute. We know that President Trump spread lies and false claims about the election, and we know that he assembled the rally on January 6th to disrupt the certification of the election by congress.
The primary difference between the BLM protests and the Stop the Steal protest is the legitimacy of the issue being protested.
Systemic racism is a real and legitimate problem in America. We have data showing black and brown citizens are treated more harshly than white citizens by both the police and by the courts. In short, for BLM protesters there’s a genuine issue at hand and a real reason to be angry, and George Floyd’s life being extinguished under the knee of a white racist cop, brought an ugly and graphic clarity about racial injustice, to millions of Americans.
In contrast, what Trump supporters were protesting on January 6th was not justified. The very foundation of the Stop the Steal protest was built on lies. There was no widespread voter fraud. The election was not stolen.President Trump did not win in a landslide.
How do we know that the issues being protested on January 6th were not legitimate?
We know this because:
The votes were tabulated and Joe Biden had 7 million more of them.
The votes were recounted several times, and Joe Biden still had 7 million more of them.
Every challenge that the president’s legal team brought to the courts was defeated in resounding fashion.
The Trump Administration’s Attorney General reviewed the claims of widespread fraud and said there was none.
The indisputable truth is that President Trump lost the 2020 election.
Now, if the candidate that I supported and trusted lost an election, and then went on to tell me every single day for weeks at a time, that the election was stolen, and that the consequence of that stolen election was that my country was going to be destroyed, I might have stormed the US Capitol as well.
Take what Doctor King said about riots and apply it to what happened on January 6th:
I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear?
They failed to hear that my vote was stolen – that the election was rigged, that I won’t have a country anymore if the election is certified
I honestly believe that millions of Americans believed what Trump told them every day for weeks before and after the election – that it was rigged and stolen. And for the thousands that showed up on January 6th, the only way to stop the steal was to stop the certification, and that meant storming the Capitol building. So that’s what they did, at the behest of our lying president.
The issue many of us are grappling with today is how did we get to the point where millions of Americans are resistant to facts and immune to the truth?
How did this happen on such a mass scale?
I believe it was the perfect storm of the browning of America, globalization, religiosity, and an opportunistic and depraved leader.
More than any other President in our history, Trump understood the value of other people’s fear. He understood that he could use that fear to his own advantage.
Trump understood that connecting with people over fears about our changing demographics, what it means to “be American”, growing secularism, and loss of manufacturing jobs, would override everything else – including truth and facts — because fear, national identity, and religion resonate at an emotional level.
Trump knew the quickest and easiest way to get people to vote for, and support him (no matter what), was to connect with them over fear.
Trump’s connecting with voters over fear didn’t involve engaging in meaningful dialog or the difficult task addressing our changing world – instead he commiserated – not because he was genuinely empathetic, but because he knew both the power and expediency of commiseration.
Trump saw early on that if he could get the disenfranchised to believe he was with them in terms of their fears around abortion, immigration, and globalization – he would have them in his pocket. Once he achieved that, he could “shoot someone in the middle of 5th avenue” and it wouldn’t make a difference to supporters.
Trump’s fake commiseration around religious issues, immigration, and globalization led to a fact-resistant base of supporters, and emboldened the President to embark on his Hitleresque desire to rule a nation.
Trump knew that once he connected with people over fear, he could lie to them with impunity, and that they would follow him off a cliff, or to the doors of the US Capitol.
Space-laser promoting Gun toting liar Bigoted Truther Nine-Eleven Denier Spewer of filth Talker of trash Dumber than dumb With boat-load of cash
Kevin McCarthy He ain’t no Vin Diesel Afraid of his base A gutless shit-weasel Checking with Trump Before speaking his mind Removing that stump From way up his behind
Where have you gone Once Proud GOP Afraid of the loonies Who support Marjorie You run from the truth Like a squirrel from noise Wyoming’s Lynne Cheney Has more balls than the boys
Time to rise-up Put an end to the slime Recognize a Truth as a Truth And a Crime as a Crime
A loss of some votes Might be the toll But at least you can say You’ve still got your soul
The battle against COVID-19 required competent and steady leadership. To stop the spread of the disease, we needed our President to be honest, intelligent, and humble.
Honest, because we needed to trust him. We needed to know that what he told us about the disease was factual so that we could make well-informed decisions to keep ourselves and our families safe.
Intelligent because infectious disease epidemiology is complicated and heady stuff. We needed a president who could read briefings, synthesize and extrapolate the relevant data, sit down with scientists, listen to what they were telling him, and effectively make sense of it so that he could communicate what he learned to the public clearly and concisely. Being able to do this would result in public confidence.
Humble because COVID-19 was an unknown and ruthless disease. What we learned early on was subject to change as new data became available. We needed a president who was humble enough to admit the challenge would be tough and require Americans to work together in a coordinated and unified manner.
We needed our President’s honesty, intelligence, and humility, and he was glaringly 0 for 3.
COVID-19 has killed more than a quarter million Americans. Tens of thousands of those deaths can be blamed on the incompetency of our President. It has wrecked our economy, devastated small businesses, and decimated families. It also shined a light on an immoral and criminally incompetent leader and, in all likelihood, ended the Trump presidency. In a weird twist of fate, if not for the virus and incompetent leadership that ensued, we might have lost our democracy.
What a devastating price to pay for electing a con artist and reality TV celebrity to the Presidency. I hope we learned a lesson as a nation – that cheap populism makes for a dangerously shaky and ineffectual national platform and that honesty, intelligence, and humility matter in a President.
Republicans gerrymandered districts, closed polling places, and appointed a crooked pro-Trump Postmaster General, who, in the middle of a pandemic, ripped sorting machines out of postal facilities and removed drop-boxes to hinder the ability to handle an increase in mail-in ballots. And after all of that politically-motivated and strategic malevolence, Trump still got his ass handed to him in a big blue box, beautifully adorned with 306 electoral bows, in what the Department of Homeland Security called the most secure Presidential election in history.
And ever since that stinging rebuke of America’s one-term orange menace, we’ve had to listen to republicans’ bitch and moan (without evidence) about voter fraud — 0 for 13 in lawsuits at the time of this writing – laughed out of courtrooms across battleground states.
We watched in bemusement at the more than eleven thousand pathetically lost souls at the “Million MAGA March” with their “Stop the Steal” signs, and thought to ourselves how easy it is in America to sway the masses. All you need is a website, a lie, and a human desire to be part of something “big and just” and its down the wallpapered-with-Q-conspiracy-theory-rabbit-hole they go, screaming and yelling like snowflakes on steroids, like zombies on crack, like lemmings on Led Zeppelin.
Shut the fuck up already. You lost. Despite all the slimy underhanded efforts to suppress the vote and misinform citizens, YOU STILL FUCKING LOST.
Instead of bitching and moaning without merit, start thinking about putting up a better candidate in 2024, and while your at it, you might want to consider the fact that America is changing. We’re becoming more diverse, less religious, and more concerned about our planet – deal with that by backing candidates who will hustle for new voters, who will reach out to the people who live and work in their state and look to genuinely understand their needs and concerns.
And for the love of Mike, don’t blindly back a shallow and vacuous megalomaniac like Trump, who for 4 years padded the wallets of rich people, lowered the tax burden for multi-billion dollar corporations, ratcheted up fear, racism, and xenophobia, tried really really hard to limit access to healthcare, rolled back environmental regulations, diminished the integrity of the Presidency by lying at an astronomical rate, withheld lifesaving information about the dangers of COVID-19, tongue-kissed authoritarians across the globe, and wrecked America’s reputation around the world.
If you can’t elect a candidate better than Trump next time around, you deserve to lose again. Biggly.
And quit being that single-issue-ban-the-fetal-tissue-voter, because all that does is make you a target for manipulative vote-grubbing slugs like Trump, who, let’s be honest, would mandate abortion if it meant overturning the 2020 election results. If you want to reduce the number of abortions in America, let’s start with improved health education, reinforced by frank and honest discussions with children about sex, sexuality, and the importance of acting responsibly, and combine that with easy access to birth control. Then, implement these measures nationally, so everyone gets the same message at the same age, regardless of their background or where they live – that would do more to reduce abortions than 9 Amy Coney Barrets.
And finally, can we please get back to the core human values that actually have made America great – kindness, empathy, honesty, and integrity and get off the dangerous, religiously-fueled-patriarchal-cult-of-personality path we’ve been on for the last 4 years, because that shit is rotting this country from the inside out.
America succeeds and prospers when its citizens get along with one another. And in a country where politics often ignites passion, getting along means not digging too deeply into each other’s political views.
So, Americans consciously work at not letting how we vote affect our relationships. It’s not always easy, but one thing that helps us keep the peace (and the republic) is a shared set of values that transcend politics.
We might have divergent views on taxation, education, healthcare, and foreign policy. Still, we unite around core values rooted in our humanity – honesty, decency, kindness, integrity, and empathy. It’s these shared values that allow you to tolerate my politics and me to tolerate yours.
So, what’s changed in America? Why are we so quick to disregard the unspoken rule that separates the personal and political?
I suspect Trump supporters are saying, “I’m not acting any different than I’ve acted in the past; I’m simply voting for the Republican candidate – why all this outrage?” And I agree with them; they’re not acting any differently than they have in the past.
What’s changed this time is not you or me – it’s the leader of the Republican party.
Donald Trump is demonstrably mean, dishonest, and apathetic. He is the antithesis of the values we assumed transcended politics and united us as Americans.
So, when I hear a colleague, a neighbor, or a friend vociferously support the former President, I process that support as an indifference to the personal (not political) values that I hold firmly — honesty, decency, kindness, integrity, and empathy.
America has never had to deal collectively with a leader like Trump.
The personalization of politics we see in our country today comes from the jarring realization that honesty, decency, kindness, integrity, and empathy do not transcend politics for Trump supporters.
The man who lied to the American people about the dangers of a deadly virus, putting millions at risk, and undoubtedly contributing to the death of thousands of Americans, has contracted that very same virus – forcing many of us to balance decorum and our capacity for empathy, against a genuine contempt for the President.
We humans have an innate capacity for empathy, which can be developed further though our shared experience with others, and the moral guidance of loving and nurturing parents — neither of which Donald Trump had.
Donald Trump grew up in an insular environment, where he was taught and praised for cutthroat behavior – he was raised in an environment that put a stranglehold on cultivating that innate capacity for empathy. Under such conditions, the result is usually disastrous and tragic on a “localized” level. Meaning, those who find themselves directly involved in business with Donald Trump, or those who are part of his inner circle because of familial ties, end up being hurt or damaged by his abject apathy and malignant narcissism.
Unfortunately for America (and the world), when Trump became president, the collateral damage borne from his apathy grew exponentially, metastasizing from a localized problem to a global catastrophe. Because of this, our democracy and the health of our planet are threatened.
We’ve witnessed Trump’s apathy in both behavior and policy — from his denial of climate change science, to his willingness to snatch and cage children, to callous paper towel tossing to hurricane victims, to labeling killed or wounded soldiers as “suckers and losers”, to his weak and feckless response to racial injustice.
When the traitorous and narcissistic fool who is dismantling democracy and destroying America from within, contracts a deadly virus, how do we draw upon the “better angels of our nature” and wish him well? (especially when we know in our hearts, that the President wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if the shoe were on the other foot).
Feeling empathy towards the deeply apathetic, is perhaps the truest empathy test of all. We owe it ourselves and our country to give it a try.
bendingtheneedle 