“Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country. It’s a great day for him, it’s a great day for everybody.”
The occupant of the White House is referencing the skewed unemployment numbers that came out last week and bringing into the conversation the man murdered in Minneapolis by a police officer who appeared indifferent to being caught on video for nine minutes while he squeezed the life out of someone over the passing of counterfeit $20 bill.
Reading the one and writing the other and I really can’t believe the depths to which our nation has sunk.
It doesn’t matter what was going through his mind when he spoke those words, there may have been no malice whatsoever, no agenda to speak of, even so, that thoughtless prattle is less than helpful. They are not the words of a man in tune with anything but his own damn self. Or, perhaps, like much of what comes out of his mouth, they are words meant to be annoying.
Did you know there was a “George Floyd” challenge? Like the Tide Pod challenge and the Ice Bucket challenge before it? I checked Snopes before I made that comment because it’s another thing I can’t believe. But, sure enough, people have lost their jobs due to their callous inhumanity and being identified in the sickening photos, and Snapchat issued warnings to its users about posting offensive material. So, yes, there may not be an epidemic of them but there are people posting pictures of themselves kneeling on someone’s neck.
A young black woman who recently reached her third decade and who has garnered an enormous following on YouTube due to a video titled “Mom, Dad….I’m a Conservative” is becoming a darling for the white people who wear MAGA hats and are aggrieved about how they are all being lumped with white supremacists. I suspect she’s just an opportunist but her views are being widely shared by those who want to reframe what we saw with our own eyes on the streets of Minneapolis.
Her name is Candace Owens and the clock on her 15 minutes of fame is running and she’s making the best of it. She said these words in reference to Hitler in December 2018 at a London symposium:
“I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word ‘nationalism.’ I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want. So when you think about whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler.” She went on to explain: “He was a national socialist. But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German. … To me, that’s not nationalism.”
She posits that elitists have poisoned the word “nationalism”? Really? Not the pasty faced poseurs like Richard Spencer? Or the professed Klansman and former Grand Wizard, David Duke? Or, what about the man-child in the Oval Office? He came out as a proud nationalist at a Houston rally.
As for Hitler, his problem wasn’t that he dreamed too big, if you remember it was that he wanted to exterminate Jews, gypsies, the disabled and anyone to the left of fascism that didn’t want to kiss his ass. Dachau was built not long after the Reichstag Fire in February of 1933. The Reichstag Fire is what cemented Hitler’s hold on Germany. I read this gal didn’t get her college degree but there is really no excuse for being that ill-informed.
She also doesn’t believe the thumb-sucker-in-chief has a racist bone in his body but then, in the article I read, she also argued with the journalist over whether the Central Park Five had been exonerated. (I highly recommend the Netflix series When They See Us.) It seems black issues are not really her purview. But, she has discovered there is ‘gold in them thar hills’ when it comes to being a contrarian.
And black.
None of this is surprising. In a country built on individualism and the freedom to speak your mind freely, you are going to have a diversity of views. But it’s sad that she’s able to provide “cover” for those in lockstep with the worst of us.
The worst of us, from the White House to the Senate to the Supreme Court to a number of statehouses, have risen to the top. Like a white nationalist version of the Peter Principle.
It’s brought out the worst of us from the police brutality, at protests and in general, to the flaunting of the Confederate flag as if it’s a badge of courage and not a cloth of treason, to the mocking of the murder of another human being.
It’s brought on the worst of us at parks, barbecues, convenience stores, fast food franchises, traffic lights, synagogues, mosques, black churches and elementary schools.
The fact that Mitt Romney went on the record to say, “Black lives matter,” indicates there is a Democratic Party, there are Republicans and there is the new Authoritarian Party.
They represent the worst of us.
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Thought-provoking and very well written essay, subtitled On Choosing to Belong to a Place, by Robin Wall Kimmerer sent to me by avid, astute and alert reader and regular contributor, Nancy Enz Lill.
Also, Harlan Ellison, one of those sci-fi fantasy authors I talked about many essays back, wrote this in 1969. Lets not be snails in a salt bucket, alright?
