This presidential election is America’s reckoning. What mighty love will we summon to ensure the ending of this violence, this hate?
By Eve Ensler / AlterNet
Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey/adapted from Gage Skidmore/Flickr CC
Donald Trump is not a leader or a presidential candidate. He is an outcome, a viral manifestation of a serious malignant illness. He is the mirror of our emptiness, the emptying out that has been happening to our country for a very long time.
He is an outcome of a two-party system that has consistently ignored the needs and wishes of the majority of Americans for generations.
He is the manifestation of celebrity culture where those that have everything are worshipped for their shiny success and in the world of celebrity that shininess is a stand in for principles, substance and moral values.
He is personality over planning, symbol over substance, insipidness over insightfulness.
He is the outcome of the rich being able to buy anything, including our democracy.
He is an outcome of centuries of underlying unaddressed, massively denied and metastasized racism.
He is the hatred of the poor and the needy, the denigration of immigrants and those seeking refuge from the devastation of US wars and imperialism.
Bloomberg poll finds 63% of Republicans who voted in the primaries think Donald Trump should be the party nominee even without an outright majority
He is the outcome of an insidious exceptionalism – the bedrock belief that American lives are more precious and valuable than any Others, those that we stigmatize, bomb, torture, murder, control, invade and whose economies we trash, whose resources we devour, whose futures we steal.
He is the outcome of fear which masquerades as bullying.
He is the manifestation of patriarchy and the endlessly indoctrinated belief that only a father will save us even though the mainly men who have been determining reality for this country and the planet have led us to near ruin.
He is the outcome of high tech fantasy, virtual disconnection, TV reality shows.
He is proof of the duplicity of corporate sponsored media that claim “neutrality” while reaping profits from propping up racists, tyrants, fascists, haters and those that would seek to destroy the country.
He is the outcome of an insanely violent culture, increasingly unkind with more bullying, that normalizes cruelty, industrializes punishment and declares endless war on its own citizens.
He is the consolidation of a government that devotes huge portions of its budget to building an imperial military rather than feeding and educating its own people, that wreaks havoc on the world rather than fighting climate change, that promotes the pillaging of the earth rather than ending violence against the people who inhabit it, that forces working people to police the world rather than providing them with meaningful work.
He is the product of a country with the most number of armed citizens in the world, where the average of 89 firearms for every 100 people leads to more deaths at the hands of fellow countrymen every year than international terrorists have killed ever.
He is the outcome of a country where police consistently murder Black women and men with little to no repercussions and millions are living in perpetual incarceration.
He is the outcome of corrupt, self-seeking, extremist politicians who ignore the constitution and make it their business to refuse any meaningful legislation from getting passed.
He is the outcome of an insidious, selfish morality where getting what you want, making money at any expense is the credo and how we behave, who we hurt, or destroy, what earth we eviscerate is inconsequential.
He is the holographic representation of the failure of a country, our denial, our refusal to act and rise for each other and to take responsibility for what our government, corporations, military are doing across the world.
He is a symptom of what happens when collective consciousness has divided and subdivided so many times within this neoliberal psychosis that we no longer know how to make alliances, build coalitions and have each other’s backs or stand with each other when the going gets rough.
He is an outcome of a country with denial as thick as its amnesia. We come to honor and idolize war criminals and racists and sexists and corporates who’ve destroyed the lives of millions.
He is an outcome of years and years of each of us being taught to fend for ourselves, fight for our own share, step over those who we are told are slower or weaker but who may in fact be deeper, more moral or more considered.
He is an outcome of a world divided between winners and losers.
He is an outcome of fatigue and privilege and disenchantment and hopelessness and exclusion.
He is an outcome of cynicism and an imposed belief that there is nothing we can really do to overcome this corporate neoliberal imperialist racist sexist homphobic earth-hating transphobic system.
The moment of America has arrived. This is our reckoning, our karma come to roost. It is way beyond the question of who we vote for in the upcoming election.
It is a question of who we are. What is America? What kind of country do we want this to be? What values and principles do we hold and cherish?
What will we do and what lengths will we go to, what collective imagination will we employ, what mighty love will we summon to ensure the ending of this violence, this hate, this destruction of our mother earth, this grotesque inequality of wealth, this mad and ferocious drive to our end?
Here’s what Donald Trump is not:
He is not us.
He is not all of us.
He is not the best of us.
He is not inevitable.
Let us take Trump at his word. Let him be our Unifier.
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Methinks you give Trump too much credit. I don’t like the guy either but basically he’s a clown and an entertainer in addition to being a business man. And he wants to get rid of all the stupid trade deals the US is involved in like NAFTA and CAFTA and WHATHAFTYA. That’s a good thing. Bernie wants that too. And Trump told Jeb! to his face on the debate stage that his brother, George W Bush, lied us into the war in Iraq. I give him credit for that. No other politician except Bernie would even say that in public.