He Equals America

The former president is an unfortunate exemplar.

Many Americans have expressed confusion about the former president’s popularity.

The answer is unpleasant but simple.

He is a reflection of the country – not the reflection that the country wishes to cast, but the one that is cast in spite of itself.

He reflects America’s worst characteristics and its lowest instincts.

When you look at the history of America, from the beginning of the nation until now, what you see are lofty ideals and admirable talk about freedom, liberty, and human rights, but lots of hypocrisy and arrogance.

You see a legacy of racism, sexism, and nativism.

White immigrants came to this country and believed they had the right to take land from the original inhabitants. They were outraged when the native North Americans fought back. Eventually, the new immigrants took over. The White immigrants assumed a posture of superiority as if their perceived God-given superiority caused them to prevail instead of superior numbers and weapons.

It didn’t matter that they had no legal, ethical, or moral claim to the land. They wanted it and murdered and subjugated the people who were here first.

White America enslaved millions of Africans, snatching them away from their homes, killing many of them on the way here. They controlled every aspect of their lives, denying them education and decent housing. They raped Black women to increase their slave stock. They worked slaves from sunup to sundown, then belittled them for being lazy. They outlawed slave education, then denigrated their intelligence. When slavery ended, White America legally disenfranchised them.

Blacks achieved some basic human and civil rights, but over time, White Americans worked diligently to erode them. Blacks may never be enslaved again, but racists work diligently to ensure they never attain equality.

Immigrants came from non-Anglo-Saxon countries, some with different religious beliefs. America segregated them into ghettoes and disenfranchised them to keep them poor and disadvantaged. Even though White America came to this country as immigrants, they act as if they have always lived here. White racists don’t want non-White, non-Christians here. They only want people who look like them, worship like them, and think like them.

Immigrants brought to America eons of paternalistic views about women. Women were property, oftentimes, an inconvenient necessity. They were needed to keep house, and to bear and take care of children. They believe that women must be regulated and controlled.

After many years, women gained a modicum of personal freedom.

Now, these freedoms are being repealed, and it might get much worse.

America denies that it is racist, sexist, and nativistic, while it constantly proves that it is guilty of all three indictments.

The former president is a living embodiment of our worst impulses.

It is not too late to change this country’s narrative.

The time is now.

We have reached a point of no return where we will either redeem the Declaration of Independence and substantiate the Bill of Rights, or we will fully and completely embrace being a sham republic.

He is the way he is because the country is the way it was, the way it is, and frighteningly, if the former president is reelected, the way it may be for years to come.