One of my friends on Facebook recently posted this on his profile:
the internet scares me. it makes me think people really would vote for trump. it makes me think people really believe obama is part of a conspiracy hatched decades ago to put a racist homosexual kenyan marxist-anarchist-fascist (say what?) in the white house. i'm losing faith in people with each new facebook group dedicated to shit like this.
I'm not going to give out his name in case he doesn't want it to be any more public than his FB account. I initially wanted to respond straight to his post, but then decided I should say the following here (after the fold):
Imagine what the world looked like to African Americans pre-1865 or the years surrounding and leading up to the Civil Rights Movement in the south. Maybe it's because we're older and more aware of what's going on around us, but the country is losing its damn mind again, for the second time in the last decade-ish. We went batshit on Muslims and look-alikes, and now we're seriously entertaining buried racist ideology simply because Obama is one of those brown people, and just can't possibly be one of us. But that's not enough. The same people have to other him even more by making him the brown person who is also a socialist commie fascist pigdog, because once we accept that as the truth, we can do anything to him and feel no remorse.
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| The Joker Socialist -- a double othering... |
This is the same rhetorical practice used to justify the Holocaust or the Gulags or slavery or the countless other racist and ideological evils that have been thrust upon humanity like a stain. It's the same practice used to make it acceptable to murder homosexuals by dragging them by a rope behind a moving car or raping them with broom handles. It's the same practice which everyday makes people afraid or irreparably damages families all over the country.
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| Because we have a rabid fear of terrorism... |
And in 20 or 30 years, or maybe 60, or 100, our children will look back, if indeed our children still exist, and they'll wonder what was wrong with us. What unspeakable mental illness had befallen us as we continued to perpetrate great evil against humanity, against people who aren't actually different, but are made different by arbitrary social "rules." And if we're still around, or more enlightened people are there to say something to those curious children, they might say we were infected with a festering hatred so buried into our blood that we couldn't contain it...couldn't hold back the tide of thousands of years of human bloodlust and fear, and in that brief little span of history we were weak, pathetic, and undeserving of the mountains luxuries and freedoms thrown at us like cheap magic tricks in a casino hotel. We were undeserving of the men and women who die on the battlefield at the behest of their country and honor.
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| Because clearly they've done so much harm to humanity... |
Some of us will have to look into our children's eyes and see that overwhelming childish confusion, much as many children today look at us when they ask us questions about slavery or, sometimes, even racism and sexism (though not so much the last of those great evils, because we still live in a world entwined in the old ideals of male superiority).
Personally, I dread that day. I wish I lived in a country where the future of my children would not be so fraught by what will undoubtedly appear to them as utter stupidity. But that's not the future my children or your children will have. Maybe one day we'll get it right, and the evils of everyday life will be relatively minor, dealt with on a case by case basis. The history of humanity, however, says otherwise, but I am always hopeful for a better tomorrow...
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