When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat."- George Carlin
I spoke with a White, forty-something Trump supporter in New York nearly a week ago and quickly realized conversation was useless. Any reasoned arguments laced with fact or logical conclusion were thwarted with the words, “change for the sake of change is good.” This got my ire up. That type of argument only holds water if you have nothing to lose or no threats to your survival or family exist. The right to control your body, reduction in voting rights, the ability to travel in and out of the country freely and exclusion because you do not look or sound like Donald Trump is frightening.
Programs, no matter how the math adds up, have little meaning if one of the goals is to eliminate you from the equation. Utopia only exist for the living. If you are an immigrant, Black, Hispanic or gay, in right wing world, you live under the constant threat of twenty-seven percent of America wishing you did not exist. Enter George Zimmerman. Mr. Zimmerman wants to profit from a gun that was used in the death on an unarmed Black teenager. The gunman is publicly auctioning the weapon as if it is a symbol of Americana. Is it not offensive enough that a grown man stalked and executed an unarmed teenage boy and was subsequently found not guilty of the charges? Now he is flaunting it in the face of the victim’s family. I cannot even fathom the anger and sorrow felt by Trayvon Martin’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, the feeling has to be as though you are being held down by bindings and you can’t break free.
As a result, the Trayvon Martin killing and the increase of many like it, remind minority groups, like me, threat to life and limb are a reality. His hero status was ballyhooed by America’s hate machines led by Fox News, conservative talk radio and the explosion of a conservative blogosphere that has been unrelenting and unfortunately effective. In the upcoming Presidential election, a thirty-year right wing campaign to smear Hillary Clinton has laid the groundwork for unproven and scurrilous charges that are vaguely outlined with the blanket statement, “she can’t be trusted.” No one ever gives specific but that phrase has just become part of the lexicon. Even liberals who say they support the Democratic Party, level the same charges with a clandestine tone, “she gave speeches on Wall Street.” Yes, she did it as a private citizen without the slightest proof of influence peddling. “She is so calculating,” name ten out of office politicians who have not given paid speeches or did not calculate their way to power. When you attach the name Clinton, it becomes nefarious.
So on the day Donald Trump makes his debut in the halls of Congress, George Zimmerman puts up for sale a gun used to take the life of a Black teenage boy and House Speaker Paul Ryan started the capitulation process to officially and publicly accept racism as part of the GOP Platform, a butler steps forward. A 17-year former employee of Donald Trump, named Anthony P. Senecal, has espoused dropping a nuclear bomb on Detroit and Milwaukee because they were, in his words, “totally disgraced by Muslims.” I hope my friend in New York who thinks that change for the sake of change is a good thing, realizes that a tornado is a change but with it comes a lot of destruction. Mr. Carlin, the freaks have come out to play.