It’s Saturday, July 4, 2020 as I write this. Obviously, it’s difficult to celebrate “Independence Day” while there is so much in the way of my faith and pride in this country. Thinking about this conflict, I rewrote one of my journal entries that reflects some of my thoughts. Here are some (mostly) unedited feelings:
I’m skeptical about going back to work. I think the number of COVID cases are going to continue to increase until we have to shut everything down again. We’re already seeing that happen in weird ways. Our leaders are failing us. By not implementing strict, across the board policies and enforcing them, they allow people who refuse to wear masks and refuse to social distance to continue going out to clubs and bars and keep spreading the virus. It’s crazy, like CRAZY, to me the way that people think their opinion about a virus (or climate change or social injustice, for that matter) has anything to do with truth or reality.
I hate when people say “we’re too divided right now” because they are usually only saying that to shut down someone else’s argument, but it’s true in this case. Society has become so politically divided because of this administration and its fellows that a global pandemic has become a political opinion. They have made it so that people believe anything and everything he says, even when it is so unbelievably and mind-numbingly stupid. Early on, he said that the virus was a political hoax and downplayed it’s seriousness. He said that and now people don’t believe that it exists, or worse, they just don’t care about protecting others around them.
I hate the way he does this, and has done this, so well over the past four years. He has somehow created a version of reality where things that are backed by science and agreed upon by experts are up for debate and speculation by anyone in any setting, with any experience or education thereof (and it’s usually none). He has created distrust between the public and the scientific community, the media, and government — the very government that he works for and represents. So the people hang on his word. The old, the white, the scared. They hang on his word, hoping that one day he’ll bring back The Good Old Days when they didn’t have to think about the human rights of black and brown people, of immigrants, of LGBTQ people, and of women.
I hate how he plays to their fears. They want to go back to an unthinking era when they could put blind trust in the police, in the presidency, and in the government. They miss the days when they could trust that government officials had their best interest at heart above everybody else. They want to go back to a time when they could give lip service to the United States being the Land of the Free, the land of equality and justice, while they remain happily at the tippy top of the food chain, where they are not only well fed, but vicious toward anyone below them. And heaven forbid anyone tries to share space with them at the top.
Image existing in a world where you’ve made yourself the default human, and othered every other kind of existence in the process, all while preaching individuality and freedom from servitude. This place feels like a joke. Nothing we’ve learned about this country in school is the full truth.
Black history is American history. LGBTQ history is American history. Women’s Rights are human rights. Nobody is illegal on stolen land. No justice, no peace.