In
today’s febrile atmosphere I ask how this will be seen by the
liberal Left.
This
Is Just the Beginning
25
June, 2017
Do
you think that being asked to leave a restaurant, or having your meal
interrupted, or being called by the public is bad? My
fascism-enabling friends, this is only the beginning.
One
thing that people who wield great power often fail to viscerally
understand is what it feels like to have power wielded against you.
This imbalance is the source of many of the most monstrous decisions
that get made by powerful people and institutions. The people who
start the wars do not have bombs dropped on their houses. The people
who pass the laws that incarcerate others never have to face the full
force of the prison system themselves. The people who design the
economic system that inflicts poverty on millions are themselves
rich. This sort of insulation from the real world consequences of
political and economic decisions makes it very easy for powerful
people to approve of things happening to the rest of us that they
would never, ever tolerate themselves. No health insurance CEO would
watch his child die due to their inability to afford quality health
care. No chickenhawk Congressman will be commanding a tank battle in
Iran. No opportunistic race-baiting politician will be shunned
because of their skin color. Zealots condemn gay people—except for
their own gay children. The weed-smoking of young immigrants should
get them deported—but our own weed-smoking was a youthful
indiscretion. Environmentalist celebrities fly on carbon-spouting
private jets. Banks make ostentatious charity donations while raking
in billions from investments in defense contractors and gun
manufacturers and oil companies. This is human nature. It is very,
very easy to do things that hurt others as long as those same things
benefit, rather than hurt, you. Self-justification is a specialty of
mankind.....
This
is all going to get more extreme. And it should. We are living in
extreme times. The harm that is being done to all of us by the people
in the American government is extreme. To imagine that Mexican
immigrants should happily cook for and serve meals to people who
enable a man who is determined to demonize and persecute them as
subhuman criminals is far more outrageous than the idea that those
enablers should not be served in restaurants. I do not believe that
Trump administration officials should be able to live their lives in
peace and affluence while they inflict serious harms on large
portions of the American population. Not being able to go to
restaurants and attend parties and be celebrated is just the minimum
baseline here. These people, who are pushing America merrily down the
road to fascism and white nationalism, are delusional if they do not
think that the backlash is going to get much worse. Wait until the
recession comes. Wait until Trump starts a war. Wait until the racism
this administration is stoking begins to explode into violence more
frequently. Read a fucking history book. Read a recent history book.
The U.S. had thousands of domestic bombings per year in the early
1970s. This is what happens when citizens decide en masse that their
political system is corrupt, racist, and unresponsive. The people out
of power have only just begun to flex their dissatisfaction. The day
will come, sooner that you all think, when Trump administration
officials will look back fondly on the time when all they had to
worry about was getting hollered at at a Mexican restaurant. When you
aggressively fuck with people’s lives, you should not be surprised
when they decide to fuck with yours.
Stop
working for this man. Stop enabling him. Stop assisting him. Start
fighting him. The people who are responsible for what is happening
are not going to get out of this with their happy wealthy respectable
lives unscathed. This is a country that locks poor people in cages
for decades for trying to make $20. This is a country that is “tough
on crime.” Remember? And the ones who make the laws are not going
to like what happens when America starts to regard them as the
criminals.
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