I DON'T UNDERSTAND

by Ruth A. Sheets

There are a lot of things I don’t understand:  how most things work, how the universe is organized, why I like certain books and don’t like others, etc.  These days, however,  most of my non-understanding involves politics.  Politics has come to consume our nation and nearly everything has become politicized.  OK, everything might always have been political, but lately, we have it smeared in our faces so we can’t miss it. 

We are reminded every day there are two sides to each story and they must be of equal value because the two sides are covered with near equal intensity, or were until Donald Trump was defeated in the November 3^rd election.  While Trump is president, the media have felt obligated to report on nearly everything Trump tweets or yells at his constant rallies even if they didn’t reproduce those tirades word for word.  Those word for word accounts were always available somewhere that people could check out in case there was doubt the media had adequately covered Trump for his supporters and enablers.  How is it people don’t get it that there is such a thing as false equivalency?

- I don’t understand why it took so long to call a lie a lie.  From the golden escalator onward, Trump’s words were permitted to stand unchallenged until some newspapers said it might be OK to say something Trump said was false or unproven, or unsupported. Those are the words now used.  I am sorry, but falsehood does not have the same punch as “lie,” and much of what Trump tweets or yells are LIES, not “falsehoods, unproven, unsupported, etc.  Not stating the lies as lies (except occasionally on MSNBC), keeps people from seeing Trump’s claims as the lies they are.  And, according to our major newspapers, Trump has lied in public more than 22,000 times and his followers lie as much as they can get away with, for example, Lindsay Graham.

- I don’t understand how people can sacrifice their integrity and personal values to support someone who has neither.  Trump has appointed people whose task was to do their best to bring down our government so Trump and friends could pick up the pieces.  They did a pretty good job and are still diligently at it.  It is clear that during the Trump transition, folks were out there hunting down the least caring, the most racist and misogynistic, the least qualified people that could be found who would blindly support Trump and his destructive actions.  Even then, bunches of them were fired for lack of loyalty or not destroying enough.

- I don’t understand how elected officials in Congress could approve of a president who, with lots of help, committed atrocities that at any other time would demand removal from office.  In case memory is not strong after all the stuff that has been going on with the election: 

- They imposed a Muslim ban of people coming from many countries that have in the past been our allies claiming they were all terrorists.

- They separated children from their parents at the US southern border, deporting children alone or parents without their children, or just simply lost the parents or the children.

- They permitted ICE, a racist fascist organization to invade people’s homes hunting “illegals” at will, even demanding that local governments assist them, deporting people who have lived and worked here for decades, serving our economic machine with little reward.

  - They permitted foreign entities to interfere in our election to elect Donald Trump, then refused to let the American people know just how extensive the interference was.

  - They worked exceedingly hard to override or negate any achievement of the Obama administration, then claimed they had done more for Blacks and “Latinos” than any other administration, and a bunch of people believed it.

  - They disbanded the pandemic task force that could have helped protect us from the COVID- invasion, then ignored scientific input related to how to stop the pandemic, and nearly a quarter million Americans have died, yet  10 million more people voted for Trump this year than four years ago.

  - They have worked to reduce environmental regulations, I suppose, thinking it won’t impact them because they aren’t Black or Hispanic living in the at-risk pollution areas.

  - They have lied about global warming, blaming the forestry service for the California fires and Nature for the intense storms.

- I don’t understand how anyone accepts the extreme incompetence of this administration.  They know how to destroy and cause harm, but have no clue how to fix anything

- I don’t understand how the Senate of the United States, an august body, we are told, could allow a man like Mitch McConnell from a small racist state to act as president and Congress all wrapped up together.  He is a partisan, racist white guy who cares only for power and money (despite being the husband of a woman of Chinese background).  It proves racism can be pretty complex.  And, voters have decided he should stay in power just doing his obstruction thing while blaming Democrats for something (not stopping him, perhaps).

- I don’t understand how so many people can go about not wearing masks.  I get it that Donald Trump doesn’t wear one.  It might smudge his make-up, but the rest of us don’t have to worry too much about that.  This virus is deadly even though a lot of white people don’t think so.

- I don’t understand how Republicans or anyone else can stand by when police brutalize peaceful protesters, when a governor is threatened with kidnapping and death, when a gun toting out-of-town teen kills 2  protesters and wounds a third, when poll workers and vote counters’ lives are threatened, when right-wingers threaten civil war, when to many, Black Lives do not Matter, when our Supreme Court, supposedly fair and impartial, allows votes to be suppressed and others to be discarded at the will of Republican officials – I DON’T UNDERSTAND!  

- I don’t understand how white America keeps falling for the racist “Willie Horton” style political ads that tell white women they have to be scared of Black home invaders.  Those ads in the Philadelphia area got some Republicans elected, not because those Republicans were competent, honest, or anything else positive, but because white people, men in particular, were scared the Democrats would defund the police, implying no more police, so who would keep their women safe from Black predators.  More than  30 years later and those ads still work.  That is racism, just in case scared white men want to claim something else.

- I’ve read a lot about the way our brains work and how easily certain emotions can be played upon.  However, I don’t understand why we can’t stand up to our emotions, at least some of the time and know that some things are just wrong and those who perpetrate them don’t deserve to hold any kind of public office.  I want to be hopeful about the coming Biden-Harris administration, but McConnell is still in power and so, nothing will get done until our nation falls even further behind.  Then Republicans will be voted into all the highest positions again, maybe, even Trump, and we will continue our decline until global warming takes us all out.  Democrats get about  2 weeks to fix the mess Republicans took more than  4 years to make.  It was like that in 2009 when Obama took office.  He didn’t even get the 2 weeks to try to fix the worst recession since the Great Depression and end 2 wars George W. Bush had started.  It is amazing he got anything done with all the obstruction by Republicans even though Democrats had the majority in both houses of Congress at first. 

- I don’t understand why we Americans don’t stop the insanity and demand more of our elected personnel.  Maybe we will this time because we are facing 3 massive problems:  global warming, COVID-19, and whether truth will survive in a land where Lying And cheating have reigned in one of the political parties for nearly 50 years.  We’ll see.