Trump is a Mirror

I’m enraged with everything that is going on in our nation right now. Disappearances off the streets, suspension of due process for immigrants, unlawful “deportations” to labor camps in a foreign country, violations of international asylum and refugee agreements, the silencing of dissent, the violation of court orders, the aggression towards our neighbors and allies.

It’s all appalling. It’s terrifying. It’s enraging.

This is not the America I believe in. The America of a land of freedom and opportunity for everyone. The American that welcomes the huddled masses yearning to be free. The America that promises equal opportunity, regardless of skin color, language, nationality, religion, creed, sexual orientation, gender, or disability.

The problem isn’t that Trump merely is demonstrating everything that the United States is not; but that he is a mirror that simply is reflecting everything that the United States has been and still is.

Read any honest history of the United States and you’ll learn that we were built on white supremacy, white nationalist ideals that called the indigenous ‘savages,’ where we broke treaties and stole land. The United States was built on the backs of the enslaved, people who had no rights because of the color of their skin.

Every age has dealt with ethnocentrism. Hating the Italians, the Irish, the Germans, the Chinese, and now the Venezuelans.

The sad truth is that Trump has no problem looking into the US’s past and finding example after example to emulate. We’ve constantly abused racial and ethnic minorities, marginalized people who are different than the majority, and enforced racially charged laws up until our present day.

The problem isn’t that Trump is a window into the past, it’s that he is a mirror reflecting every demon in our selves that we thought we had exorcised.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t resist. It doesn’t mean that we don’t oppose this autocratic takeover of the United States at every place we possibly can.

But it does mean that we have to do so honestly. We have to deal openly with our past and our present or we will never have a future as a country. A return to the status quo is not an option. The status quo where black and brown bodies were treated as commodities to be imprisoned for profit, where we blame the poor for their poverty instead of blaming the rich for their opulence that causes poverty in the first place.

That status quo needs to be done away with, but in its place we don’t need a return to the past that only promises more of the same. Where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; where we imprison racial, ethnic, and gender minorities while suspending their due process; where “white” is supreme and everything else is “savage”.

We need a new future. One that finally lives up to the American Dream. That lives up to our best aspirations that every person has the right to seek life, liberty, and happiness. Where diversity is celebrated; where everyone has enough to eat and can lead a happy and comfortable life. We need to move ourselves towards something better.

Trump is simply a mirror into the darkest corners of our soul. Let’s allow the light to expose that which we’ve been trying to hide, extricate it from our midst, resist a return to the darkness, and instead move forward into a new vision of our common life together.