Four years ago when we heard Trump talk about "American carnage" we thought he was talking about the past and we didn't realize he was talking about what he was bringing to Washington DC in four years.
Right now we have more National Guard troops in Washington DC than in Iraq and Afganistan.
P.S.
50 years ago I was writing a paper for high school on political extremism in the United States. I had an uncle who belonged to the John Birch Society which was a crazy conservative group that promoted many right-wing conspiracies. They grew out of the anti-communist movement of the 1950s that followed Joseph McCarthy's effort to identify communists in the American government. I met with the leader of the Society in my area, Scranton PA, to gain information for my paper. What I learned was that their movement saw the changing society that resulted in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as fueling much of their anger. They talked more about "negros" than they did about communists. They talked about how their resistance sometimes meant violent confrontation. Shortly after my meeting, we saw the assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. The resistance had begun to target political and cultural figures. We look back on that time as a troubled time in our history that we hoped would never return but I am afraid that we are in that same situation today. What happened at the Capitol last week is not the end of this process but the beginning. We now have a resistance that feels threatened by foreign immigrants and people of color that are changing the demographics of our Country and the electorate. Elected officials and other leaders have a right to fear for their safety in the future. They will be targets now of a resistance movement that sees them as representing the changes in our society that threaten them. If the 1960s taught us anything violent confrontations and political assassinations are a real possibility in the near future.
No comments:
Post a Comment