Empty wagons and barrels, this time that familiar rattle is emanating from the cavernous skull of the current President of the United States, Donald John Trump Sr. Day after day columnist, bloggers and those just plain fed up have tried the impossible, finding the irreducible point of Donald Trump. After my moment of outrage following the President’s most vulgar of terms, and newest nickname for a third of the world’s population and land mass, I took a deep breath and searched for perspective.
Listen, I will be sixty-two years old in a few short months and I have heard the word the President used a few days ago and much worse almost every day of my life; from teens, young adults or old guys with manicured lawns, crude language is neither shocking or earth-shattering. This is a little different. I like being able to travel the world as a proud American. I have often been the receptacle of the world’s opinion of my fellow citizens, but I have never been embarrassed. I have been challenged on policy and have defended and assented to new and valid ideas. For the first time in my life, paraphrasing Michelle Obama, I am afraid of mentioning my citizenship because it is an admission of being led by an openly racist, bigoted, buffoon and braggart.
As a descendant of one of those “shithole countries,” I cannot readily identify because of slavery and miscegenation, I should be angry, but I have long gotten past the injustice of the New Land. Mr. Trump made sure to put a racist period on the point by recommending Norway as a more suitable country to draw from its pool of immigrants. I am not sure if my lack of shock is an appropriate response, because I have become numb to his proud stupidity. I live in a neighborhood of people of all manner of color, race, religion, and ethnicity. I am close to a woman from one of the disparaged countries, she worked hard to get here and legally stay here.
She has spoken of the hardscrabble life and harshness of her life but never has she not expressed the beauty that surrounded the poverty she escaped. Comedian Redd Foxx used a line that went something like, ‘I did not know I was poor until someone told me.’ In my own experience I grew up with not all the advantages in life, and in one of the same neighborhoods, Trump spent weeks disparaging on the campaign trail. I walked out my door in a racially diverse neighborhood not ducking bullets, I was within 15 miles of some of the best colleges in America, the men, and women who lived and raised children in my neighborhood worked hard every day. This moment in modern day abnormality by the elected President of the United States, for me, can only be tempered by the words of a man whose birthday is just three days away, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
“We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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