The Harshness and MEANNESS of Today’s US Are Appalling

If one thing has emerged as a defining feature of our ‘Trumpified’ USA, it’s the appalling harshness and meanness that have infected many Americans. Much of this mean-spirited madness was initially confined to the Internet, talk shows, Trump’s rallies, and certain legislative bodies, but it has spread and grown over the past decade. Oh yes. It has spread into our hometowns and daily lives and has taken up lasting (hopefully, not permanent) residency in our minds and emotions.

Accompanying this ugly phenomenon is a dizzying downward spiral of fear, intense anxiety, and mounting stress. My wife and I have complained countless times about the constant ‘firehose to the face’ of way too much depressing or fear-inducing information. Sometimes, we don’t even want to read or hear the daily news — because it’s almost always bad.

Often, we feel both overwhelmed and disgusted. It’s all just… too much. It’s tantamount to living in a constant state of mental and emotional overload. It’s crazy-making. It’s incredibly unhealthy and toxic. It’s deeply exhausting. It’s actually poisonous to our well-being and our very sanity.

The big question we find ourselves facing, over and over again, is: How can we survive these crazed and dangerous times with our sanity and moral compass intact?

Fear, hate, bullying, and vengeful autocracy

What I’m seeing, over and over, is the expansion and increasing public expression of hate, racism, misogyny, cruel patriarchy, and ‘Christian’ nationalist beliefs. This public expression usually takes the form of nasty bullying, insults, and both overt and indirect oppression. Here in my home (?) state of Texas, over the past year, right-wing politicians have instigated and fanned the flames of anti-Muslim fears and mounting hate. They have turned the simple fact of being Muslim into a huge, scary boogeyman — all for short-term political gain.

This exemplifies how semi-democracies and semi-sane societies like ours go totally off the rails and ‘flip out,’ devolving into anti-democratic, crazed hate-fests. Every dictatorship or autocracy employs and purposely intensifies such fear-amplifying tactics. In the US, these tactics have been used to drum up deep fear of immigrants and non-white folks, with the horrifying result that many brown-skinned folks — even legal citizens — are now afraid to go out to the store or school or anywhere, for fear of being apprehended and imprisoned without any viable way out.

In short, our entire society seems to be experiencing a vast, intensifying regression to earlier and much more primitive and hateful ways of thinking and being. Scarily, our supposed ‘land of the free’ is morphing — rapidly — into a hate-infested land of fear and oppression that is ‘free’ only for white Christians. It’s utterly terrifying.

Has the GOP’s ‘reign of terror’ scared us into silence?

Of course, such a wild pendulum swing toward renewed hate, racism, misogyny, etc. is bound to create intense pushback. Yet, so far, the pushback in the US has been quite muted, to the point of being almost non-existent at times. Why? Why is there so little effective pushback?

My wife and I have puzzled over this, and we’ve concluded that almost everyone is running scared and has been effectively scared into silence (if not complicity). But guess what, this is exactly the reaction that the forces of oppression and autocracy want and push hard to create!

Their deliberate ‘reign of terror’ has had the desired effect — and then some. Their relentless ‘firehose to the face’ of outrageous lies, oppressive policies, and endless fear-and-hate-mongering has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, precisely because these forces have a loud, very persistent mouthpiece and cheerleader in Resident Trump (I refuse to call him my president).

Due directly to Trump and the MAGA-fied GOP, along with our overly-docile, compliant media, our nation has quickly morphed into a brazen autocracy that widely rejects non-whites and instead supports the ugly racist (and misogynistic) ‘ideals’ of white Christian nationalism.

It’s gotten so crazy and so out of hand in the US that sane, open-minded, compassionate people are struggling to deal with all these bizarre shifts and even survive emotionally, as noted earlier. And our governmental and social systems are so broken or stuck in deep dysfunction that there is little hope of a quick turnaround or major short-term ‘improvements.’

The best we can hope for is slooowwly reversing the destruction

I hate to say this, but it looks like the best liberals can hope for, now, is to stop the bleeding and slow the spread of hate and oppression. Until now, the Democrats have proven incapable of reining in Trump and MAGA, though they desperately want to — mainly because, in our (warped) political system, ‘winner takes all’ and the GOP is controlling our entire federal government… while the hapless Dems are relegated to the sidelines and rendered totally powerless.

But consider: this is exactly why it’s so crucial to get out and vote, and encourage others to vote blue as well, this November! Even though today’s Democrats don’t inspire much confidence, in general, it’s still true that they and their policies are infinitely better and far more compassionate. We can’t and shouldn’t expect a massive, rapid turnaround — but we damn well should do everything in our power to ‘kick the (complicit GOP) bums out.’

And in today’s US, the power of the ballot is one of the few public powers we citizens still have available to us (for now, anyway, since Trump and his allies are pushing hard to control and limit voting). The US truly IS at a major, decisive turning point — and the upcoming election is probably our last, best chance to begin healing and revitalizing our collapsing society and semi-democracy.

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This post was previously published on The Left Is Right.

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