With great regret, I draw to your attention TV’s Donald Trump. The president of the United States. The one Evangelicals and some right-wing Catholics fawn over as if he were the second coming of Christ. The one whom we’re assured is the most pro-life president since Reagan. The one who took several days to condemn white supremacism, and then almost immediately turned around and said there were fine people on both sides. Do you all recall that event?
Well, tonight, he called people who kneel during the National Anthem in order to protest racism SOBs. Only he didn’t use initials, he just said it. It’s a word I can’t say on Patheos, but here’s a clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrW-GI_9IL8
So, for anyone who’s keeping track, the president thinks we have to be very delicate about white supremacists, assume they have the best of intentions and praise the good on “both sides.” But a man who kneels silently in commemoration of African-American deaths at the hands of police officers gets cussed out in a public speech. White people who parade with the flags of the Confederacy and the Third Reich– two regimes which fought wars against the United States and murdered Americans– were treated lightly, but a black person who takes a knee instead of standing to salute the American Flag is called names and ought to be “fired.”
And listen to the ovation the crowd gave him.
That’s what concerns me the most.
I don’t think there’s any question that the president is a bigot. He’s always been a bigot. Few have bothered to deny that. What shocks me, though it probably shouldn’t, is just how many people get excited at his racism. Listen to the ovation they gave him for that idiotic remark. Watch him walk around the stage and bask in it.
This is the country we live in.
The president went on to say that quietly kneeling during the “Star Spangled Banner” is a “total disrespect of our heritage, a total disrespect of everything we stand for.” But marching around Charlottesville carrying the flags of two of our most famous enemies is too nuanced for him to condemn without hemming and hawing and claiming there were fine people on both sides.
According to the president, a harmless act of peaceful protest by a black man is disrespect for everything the United States stands for. But white men chanting “Blood and soil,” a chant composed by Nazis who murdered American soldiers and tortured them in prison camps, is too nuanced for him to express a clear opinion about in a timely manner.
And he received a round of applause.
This is the history our children and grandchildren are going to read about someday. And they will ask us what stand we took.
Let me go on the record as condemning the president and everyone who cheered him on.
(image via Pixabay)
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In