This is America Now

Some people find it odd that I blame our president for the shooting of two Hindus, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, in Kansas.

Yes, there are always people who go off the deep end and murder people. The difference this time, I feel, is that the president encourages feelings of fear and distrust towards immigrants. Not just undocumented immigrants, all immigrants. He has told people that immigrants are to blame for their problems.

It is like the movie The Fisher King. A radio shock jock DJ goads an unstable listener and the man goes out and shoots a restaurant full of people. And the DJ loses his job. He might not be legally culpable, but people blame him for not handling the situation appropriately. And I blame Trump for not handling the fears and frustrations of his supporters appropriately.

He tapped into a river of fear that exists among white people in America. And instead of alleviating that fear, he encouraged and deepened it. Instead of treating their ills, he told them to blame immigrants and if all the not-white people would just go away then everything would be beautiful. “Make America Great Again.” Where is that again? It’s when minorities didn’t have a voice. They were there but you didn’t have to hear from them. You didn’t have to be nice to them.

Trump continues to handle this situation very poorly. He has made no statement about the Kansas shooting. He has the time to tweet about Saturday Night Live teasing him, about murders in Sweden that didn’t actually happen at all, if someone not-white is accused of a crime he is quick to point it out. But now he is silent. He does not condemn the actions of the Kansas shooter.

He won this election by courting white supremacists and the kind of Christians who want a theocracy in this country. Already his secretary of education is talking about bringing the Christian God into public schools.

There will be more deaths. As long as people can turn to their leader and see that he agrees with them that people of color are not as important as white people, they will feel justified in taking care of the “problem” themselves.

The message from leadership needs to be that murder is not okay! It’s not okay if it’s a person of color killing a white person and it’s not okay if it’s a white person killing a person of color and it’s not okay no matter what races or nationalities or religions are involved. It’s never okay.

How is a leader going to stop terrorism when he only picks and chooses which terrorists to condemn and issue a statement about?

I feel like Cassandra, warning about the disasters to come and no one listening! I said before that the kind of people Trump courted to win this election cannot tell the difference between a Muslim and a Hindu. The shooter believed these two men were “Middle Eastern” when they were in fact Indian Hindus. While I don’t support people murdering Muslims either, Hindus need to stop relying on our religion being mostly unknown or seen as safe. When these people look at an Indian Hindu, they see a terrorist. And the president has told them that’s what they should see. Anyone not-white is a threat according to his philosophy. Yet the white men who have been committing murder and mass murder of people of color? He has remained silent about it.

Trump said he would be a friend to Hindus. What kind of friend is this? He doesn’t care about us and he never has. Hindus should not be living in fear in this country (no one, in fact, should be living in fear in this country). Suggestions have come out not to speak Indian languages in public. But I’m sorry to say that right now having an accent and/or not-white skin still puts you in danger. And I don’t know what to do about that.

All I can say is this is not my America and how many deaths will it take before we can say we gave this president a chance and all he’s done is increase fear and insecurity?