I'm sure these people impacted don't believe me - but I will go to my grave convinced that the problem is the collective overreaction to Trump FAR more than anything else. The dude isn't racist in any meaningful sense. The right is not homo/transphobic (I'm a m2f transgirl)
The reality so many people, including my own family, are living through does not reflect my own. It's like we're in two different worlds.
I wonder how this happened pretty often. If there was any realistic argument for the media being an enemy - it's this. I say that because
I genuinely think they did this. What I hear is repeated and consistent intentional misunderstandings of what Trump is saying. For example - so often we hear that Trump called neo-Nazis 'very fine people'. It was even brought up in the debates. However,
it's somewhere between a very massive misreading of his words and an utter lie. Just now I found the quote in under 1 minute using google - something many reporters struggle with. I underlined the key part in red.
But I don't mean to talk about politics - I just needed to at least make an effort to characterize the problem.
Now, yes - Trump says rude things. He did call some countries hell-holes. But on a scale of 1 to Hitler - I don't think it even registers. It's quite clear that
he meant certain countries have pervasive corruption, extraordinarily limited freedoms, oppressed/abused women, etc. Some 10-15 countries still kill gays. Women only got the right to drive in Saudi Arabia in 2017 - reportedly because women aren't capable.
Trump is quite clearly criticizing a stunted culture that restrains the human spirit and free will - not a person or a race. I guess it's easy to forget that it's not racist to criticize a country or culture - still though, let's think shit through.
What about the time Trump said Mexicans were rapists?
No, he didn't. This isn't even close, imo. Trump was clearly trying to point out that many of the people sneaking into our country are not doing it as refugees to take care of their family. Of course many are - but
his point was that the border needs to be maintained.
This is one of those things that truly pisses me off. The old democrat stand in to call people they disagree with 'anti-immigrant' or 'racist.' This is particularly irritating because of how blatantly misleading it is.
The right and Trump are not anti immigration. They are anti-illegal immigration. There's a big difference between crossing over under dark - and using legal means.
But in the end - the left would sooner hate the right throughout their entire being than give them
the benefit of the doubt to realize there's a difference between what could just as easily be a poor mother fleeing to America with her children for a better future - or a child being trafficked across the border. There's no paperwork for these sorts of crossings
I think 99% of the democrats would understand why we need to separate these children and verify that the child is not being victimized.
What about 'children in cages'?
Yeah. Technically. Tennis courts are in cages, too, I guess.
Frankly, this is one of those things people freak out about because they're indulging their emotions rather than their reason. Where do you think the kids will sleep? With the amount of people crossing our border - the process of verifying whether or not
a child is being trafficked gets longer and longer. This inevitably leads to facilities becoming overwhelmed so, often, the we must be resourceful. However -
The cages are invariably inside buildings with both heating and a/c. They have bathrooms, they provide warm/dry clothes
and the kids are each given their own mats to sleep on. The cages come into play moreso in an effort to keep the children safe, to prevent them from wandering unmonitored, etc. They have warm meals. Snacks. A chain link fence is not evidence of abuse. That fence provides
privacy and a sense of security to many. But even if it's not so awesome - what's so bad about it? They're warm, well fed, and safe. For people who are sneaking in and who could just as easily be trafficking children and narcotics - this is not even remotely on par with
places like Auschwitz, Vorkuta Gulag, White Sea Baltic forced labor camp. Even at our darkest and most egregious failure since 1865 - the Japanese internment camps - the idea of comparing them to these other places is purely propaganda and disrespectful to the million who died
That our internment camps share nomenclature with the concentration camps of Germany is where the meaningful comparisons end. Unlike Germany, those interned were fed, clothed, and given reasonably nice accommodations.
If anything truly signifies the difference -
it's the fact that population rose as children were born in the Japanese internment camps - and when finally shut, the populations had all increased noticeably - something profoundly different from places like Auschwitz and Dachau.
So anyways. What I'm trying to say is - I believe that people truly hate Trump. However, I think this will turn out to be one of the most widespread examples of mass hysteria in world history.
Like I said - I'm not arguing for you to like Trump - I'm arguing for ppl to have
some sense of perspective. This is the epitome of a first world problem. Beyond that - it's possible to have more than two emotions towards Trump - agape & horror. Trump is clearly crude...but even those things he's labeled a racist for saying...just aren't. Think about it.
You can say that the right too often makes excuses for Trumps verbal mishaps. But that doesn't mean we're about to commit a genocide. In the 1930s Germany wasn't shy about defending their persecution of Jews. They certainly weren't arguing that 'Hitler didn't say that'.
If you have to convince a person that something is racist - ur not even close to Nazi Germany. In our effort to push past the history of humankind - we've started focusing on subtle racism, micro-aggressions - because almost no one genuinely has an aggressively racist world view.
I agree that systemic racism is everywhere. However, I believe it's not so much racism as it is in group bias and feeling more comfortable around people we're familiar with than people we aren't. It's the same for every minority amongst a majority population. Have perspective.
