President Obama gave a press conference at the
White House on Monday, November 14, before leaving for a series of state visits
overseas. His intelligence and grasp of the minute details of governance only
highlighted the fact that Donald Trump is going to look
like a complete buffoon at his first news conference. Maybe he'll get impeached
for mental incompetence.
Growing up in the years following World War II, one of the
persistent questions that was always just below the surface was, "How
could good people allow the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust to happen?"
Well, now we know. There's not a lot you can do to stop it. Not everyone is
enlightened, and sometimes the mob underbelly wins. I hate to sound defeatist,
but all I can come up with is that Germany survived it. It took a generation or
two, but Germany's still here, and better than ever. Better than us, in terms
of education at least. It's gonna suck. People are going to die. People have
already died. From the Emanuel 9 to the 49 at the Pulse nightclub, and all the
black men killed by the police in between. Hopefully it won't be six million,
but make no mistake, this is exactly how it happened before. Hitler was
popularly elected. It is only a matter of time before a picture leaks of a
Confederate battle flag being displayed at the White House. Steve
Bannon may not survive the scrutiny, but there are going to be plenty
of people who would like to mark their territory.
I can't even. With a Republican president and the
Republicans in control of both the Senate and House, they are going to have a
free-for-all and enact all the batshit extremist policies they have been
wanting to enact for decades. Already Trump has appointed a climate-change
denier as head of the EPA. It's just going to be a mess. The only hope is that
even Republicans will see how crazy it is and we'll elect a Democrat in 2020. I
don't even want to talk about who right now. That's what got us in trouble this
time, having a presumptive nominee for eight years. Let's see who does the best
job in congress pushing back against the madness, and nominate her.
Ironically, "Make America Great Again" will mark
the end of American Exceptionalism. We will cease to be the leader of the
world. Our universities will probably begin to suffer as the best students from
around the world (who, admit it, are the best students at our research
universities) will be afraid to come here. Our leadership vacuum will lead
to political instability around the world to the extent that some other nation
is going to have to step in and be the voice of reason. The scary thing is,
policy and administration discord aside, our military is still wrapped around
the globe like no other country's. What do we do with that?
I woke up again this morning just about ready to smile
because I'm awesome and I live in an awesome town and have an awesome job and
have awesome friends like you, but that all lasted for about 15 nanoseconds
before I reminded myself that I now live under a fascist regime that isn't
going anywhere for at least four years. Now I know how intellectuals in Nazi
Germany felt. Resigned and grateful that they were not Jewish (those who were
not Jewish). I'm a white male. I'll be fine. And Jews will probably be fine
this time around as well. But Muslims and blacks are rightfully scared for
their lives. There is going to be a new, American Kristallnacht in our future.
And it will go down in history. And America will not be the same. America is
already not the same. Rachel Maddow said it best on the
night of the election: "If you're a Muslim-American right now, I think
that tonight has to feel not just like a seismic political event but like a
seismic event about what America means."
JFK famously said, "The United States, as
the world knows, will never start a war." That is the United States that I
grew up in. I took it for granted that we were the good in the world. George
W. Bush and Dick Cheney negated that. The other thing
you could always say about the United States--what Rachel is talking about when
she refers to "what America means"--is that we were open to
immigrants. America wasn't so much a place as an idea: the idea of freedom. We
no longer represent that idea. We're just a bunch of pigs, and now we have a
pig for our president.
I'm just going to try to continue to be nice to the people I
interact with daily. Beyond that, I don't think there's a whole lot I can do.
The forces of history are too strong.
