Nothing’s so loud/as hearing when we lie/the truth is not kind/and you’ve said neither am I
-Glen Phillips, Toad the Wet Sprocket, “All I Want”
I hate to be a “Not My President” person, as I’m a strong believer that the whole concept of democracy is that you engage in the process and you make the results work somehow. I certainly lived that way for the 8 years of George W Bush (who, even before Aziz on SNL this past week I was proclaiming my nostalgia for). I want to feel like things can still work for the country in the new order. I really do.
But I’m not an idiot. I can see what is happening all around me.
Perhaps this is what America needed. I’ve told anyone who wanted to listen that the ascension of Donald Trump isn’t a real change in how people act. This wasn’t the arrival of a rich white regime that wasn’t concerned with diversity or with the working class or the poor. This wasn’t the rise of homophobia and dismissive misogyny. As numerous vocal minorities have voiced, this was the simply a pulling back of the curtain. I put it this way when I try to explain it: America was this way while Obama was in office, but having Obama gave us what was literally the word for his campaign, it gave us hope. With President Trump the illusion is gone. We’re just face-to-face with what the 1% is, and instead of controlling things from outside the White House, one of them is in there, too (though it sounds like he’d rather live in his own buildings).
America didn’t get more mean spirited. We didn’t get less tolerant. We just decided to let all the people who weren’t vocal about it celebrate their feelings. We basically Gamergate-d the country, with Hillary Clinton playing the Zoe Quinn role. There have been people with this level of distain for those who aren’t exactly like them since the founding of this country. Now they’re just easier to see because they’re making all the noise they’d like.
If you know someone who is in a minority group that has suffered any manner of persecution (which basically means if you know someone who isn’t a fully-able Christian or non-religious heterosexual white dude), they can tell you that in certain settings, people with hateful and oppressive agendas have been loud and proud for time recorded. I’ve had interesting experiences with this, as I pass fairly easily, I’m an academic, and I study the most nerdy-non-science stuff possible (I teach a class that uses Dungeons & Dragons and have movie posters on my office wall). I also went to an all-white (but me and one family from Laos) school in a town where the voting polls can close at 8:05 am on election day because all the ballots are for the Republican. I’m from Indiana, which reads as super-white even though the name of the state is “Indian”a. Still, I have witnessed racism at every level of my education and as part of every job I’ve had, not to mention in the community.
Let me give you a subtle example. One so subtle some people will say “that’s not racism!” But I lived in a town called Okemos, MI while I was doing my Ph.D studies (at Michigan State, which has a program that is extremely Indigenous friendly, btw, thanks in no small part to my elder, mentor and friend Malea Powell). The best way for me to drive to the MSU campus was through an extremely affluent and as far as I could ever see entirely white subdivision. The streets had names like Chief Pontiac Lane and Shawnee drive. That’s land that used to belong to my ancestors, or more appropriately to my ancestor’s peers. And now rich white people live there, on land their ancestors grifted my ancestors out of (if they didn’t outright steal it). And much like the sports star mocking the opposing team, to insure that no one can forget their ancestor’s vile, sinful actions, the community decided to name the fucking streets after Native tribes and people. That’s insipid racism bubbling under the surface, easy to see but usually ignored or written off.
This brings me to the Dakota pipeline. The fight to move that pipeline away from Standing Rock, to protect the life-giving water of numerous Lakota Sioux, received enough news attention that if you don’t know the story already, you just need to go read. After considerable effort, President Obama and his administration chose– wisely– to halt construction of the pipeline. What they realized is that at best, and I mean that AT BEST, they would be looking at another Flint, MI situation. At worst, they could be dealing with a catastrophe much worse. I’m not a trained scientist, but I can pretty easily understand how routing unprocessed oil sludge through the water table is probably a bad idea. That’s without considering the various other impacts of such construction. It’s just a bad idea, and more importantly, it violates a treaty.
President Trump amid his executive order “I don’t need a Congress” legislating session chose to reverse the Obama Administration’s actions and resume building the Keystone Pipeline and the Dakota Pipeline. And he also gave the EPA and pretty much all of science (as far as he seems to think) a gag order. He’s done a bunch of other stuff, most of which seems like it might be destructive.
Look, I don’t want to see things get worse. But I can see the writing on the wall, or in this case on the Twitter feed. Rolling back Obamacare with no alternative. Ignoring science. Building a big wall with money we don’t have. Slowly erasing women from the political process. Appointing a Secretary of Education who doesn’t even understand how education is supposed to work. This is not a leader who appears to care about the people. He seems to care about “his” people, a group of Americans that are some sort of odd dream construct, who live in a world where there are “alternative facts.”
So now we choose. Do we strive to become his people, or do we find a way to express that he’s stuck being the President of all of us. And that means, just like the 44 men to have the job before him, he might have to make a hard decision or two, and he might not be able to just sit and write down what he wishes the country would do, sign it, and slide it across his desk. He doesn’t get that power. And as someone who dogged the last President over his birth certificate for at least seven years, President Trump knows that.
Perhaps the President already realizes this is a problem. He refused to answer the question when asked what he’d say to the Standing Rock Sioux. What could he say? “Gotta have that oil!” doesn’t have a Presidential ring.
This cannot stand.
I honestly wish President Trump well, but I get the feeling he wouldn’t offer me the same courtesy, and that scares me. If we don’t voice our concerns, if we don’t work for change, this is going to be a mess.