Last summer, I rage-tweeted about the fall of America.
Every day’s news cycle brought a fresh new hell. Caging refugees. Anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hate crimes on temples and mosques. Mass shootings at schools, markets, and places of worship. White Supremacists marching, on cable news shows and making immigration policy.
It all makes you want to scream “This can’t be America!” or “This isn’t America!”
Unfortunately, what it is is a weaponization of our basest American prejudices. Fueled by bigotry, othering, misogyny, and a transactional amoral who-cares-just-win approach to all things, the truth is, what we are seeing is the emboldening and empowerment of base values that have been part of America for a very long time.
It’s time for us to choose what America we want to be, and to stand up and fight like hell for it.
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Draw a straight line from 9/11 to today’s American hellscape. Instead of coming together as a nation, we’ve let ourselves become ripped apart. Not by anyone else. By ourselves. By our own bigotry, racism, and sexism.
That was the strategy: to weaponize our hate.
Today, the GOP openly and brazenly lies every day. It brands its political enemies as “ISIS” or “Muslim loving” or “socialists.”
Today, 13 year-old boys in NJ schools follow the lead of our president and tell other boys to “go back to where they came from” and beat up their mothers.
Today, right-wing anti-Semites shoot up synagogues, and their leaders brand their left-wing opponents as “anti-Semitic.”
Today, the lead policy maker for the administration is a sociopath who separates refugee immigrant children from their parents in cages.
America weeps at this “leadership” and those who follow it and lay waste to any values we once claimed define us.
If we keep tapping into hate, ignoring the lies, and sitting around passively watching — instead of coming the hell together and standing up and putting an end to this — it will all go down the tubes.
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Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Joe Crimmings (Attribution License)
For more focused rage by Michael Kasdan, see: #WeRageForLove: A True Test of Love vs. Hate.