Photo by Patrick Hendry, Unsplash
Photo by Patrick Hendry, Unsplash
A proper government takes care of all of its people. You would think that the literal meaning of "America First" would communicate that.
The idea of creating a class of others that are less than people is not new. It has been around for centuries and has used various guises to make this degradation marketable.
Back in the late 1800s Wilhelm Wundt, a psychology professor at Leipzig University put forth the stupid theory that man is just an animal. Besides being totally false, it was useful to Kaiser Wilhelm at the time. It gave him the premise with which to indoctrinate his military that killing the enemy was no big deal—they were just animals anyway. Welcome to one of the justifying insanities of World War I.
For centuries before that slavers, slave traders and slave owners were justifying their crimes against African people by telling themselves that these people were less than human. In fact this insanity is still circulating in America today—amplified by Trump’s validation of white supremacy.
Hitler used this concept against the Jews, the Roma people, homosexuals and political enemies. Stalin used this idea to kill 30 million Russians even before Hitler started killing Russians.
The Civil War was fought over this idea. It was the fuel that ran the engine of Jim Crow for decades.
But here is a possibly better statement of this idea: only the people who think they are above other humans are actually less than human because they cannot accept humanity as a whole.
And a person who cannot accept the survival and vitality of Mankind as a living entity is bereft of the understanding of man and is really missing a part of his own soul.
How does this apply to our current situation? It should be pretty obvious, but for the record let’s state it again.
We are living under a “government” which has abandoned the founding principle of this country that all men are created equal. This is a daily observable fact.
There has always been a tendency in societies to exclude or classify people in various levels of worth. The practice is many millennia old. Various efforts by “common” people against those who considered themselves elite slowly chipped away at this apparently implacable idea. Even back in the day of the “divine right of kings” efforts such as the Magna Carta were part of the slow evolution of human—all humans—rights.
DEI—diversity, equality and inclusion—was the label given to the accumulation of these efforts in the US and one of the ideas that America attempted to export as a component of Democracy.
Trump and his cronies think that DEI is a divisive concept. Yes, that is stupid. But it is also evil.
Trump and his faction—and they should really be called just a faction because they are coming to represent fewer and fewer Americans every day—run on this evil engine of hatred. It is the engine of discrimination that fuels the well-funded ICE Gestapo rounding up and warehousing brown-skinned people for the crime of not being white. The label given them is illegals, making them less than human. And they are being treated as less than human in their incarceration in hopes they will raise their hands and say, I’ll self-deport, just stop the abuse.
Exclusion is what Trump is doing every day by cutting funds and programs to states where he did not receive a majority of votes. He apparently thinks America is one of his country clubs and since the “dues” of votes were not given, he can exclude these states from membership to their own country.
Intolerance is what Trump displays to anyone who has the temerity to question any fraction of his actions. Not to mention entire facets of our countries population. If you are Black, Latino, Gay, etc., good luck getting any semblance of respect from this man. Even when he acknowledges support from members of any of these and other social groups because of a few individuals that do support him, it rings obviously false.
A proper government takes care of all of its people. You would think that the literal meaning of “America First” would communicate that. But Trump and his people did not serve all the people in his first term and in his second so far, even less. In essence he has refused to do the job for which he was hired.
When a person doesn’t do their job in a company, what do you do? You fire them.
When the person hired not only doesn’t do his job but works flat-out to destroy the organization, rob its funds and shut down any apparent possible remedy—those that hired him are now responsible for that destruction.
Right this minute that is on us. We’ve allowed this to go on far too long. We have not melted the phone lines of Congress calling for his impeachment and the impeachment of his criminal accomplices.
This November the members of Congress who failed in their duty to the country by allowing Trump and his corruption to continue can be thrown out and replaced by people who will. We can do that. We must.
And this is the one thing that scares Trump. Let’s keep him scared and restore the path to a more perfect union he is bent on destroying.
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
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