With everything that has happened since the surreal inauguration of Donald Trump on 20th of January, I have found myself feeling paralysed and numb. The string of ridiculous Presidential Executive Orders this week has dashed any hope that maybe the election rhetoric was just puffery to get him elected.
As Trump surrounds himself with ignorant and dangerous extremists, it is hard to see any good in the coming four years for America or the world.
Petty and angry responses to the coverage of the inauguration, termination of the Acting Attorney General, Paula Yates, with terms like ‘betrayal’ has given any undergrad psychologist enough information to diagnose Trump with a narcissistic, paranoid, vindictive personality disorder. This is the man who now has his finger on the Nuclear Button.
This compounding week of unbelievable events unfolding has left me dazed.
It feels like all the voices of reason, compassion and tolerance are stammering incoherently. It is as though the scale of the insanity, the crazed support of a blinded and increasingly belligerent right-wing populace has left us speechless and despairing.
Usually when I see an injustice in the world, I can write a song about it. But the song that came to me this week is about the absence of a song, I have no words to suggest that we look at the positives or we maintain hope in the future revival of humanity.
We are not in new territory here, the consequence of demonising a portion of society can be starkly observed in the Jedwabne progrom in Poland, 1941. This atrocity wasn’t perpetuated by the Nazi’s, but by 23 Polish men who burned alive at least 340 Jews from their own town. It is not by accident that I pick this example from World War II. The comparisons between the rise of Trump and Hitler have already ready been widely made. Others have suggested Mussolini as a more fitting parallel, neither one bodes well.
Trump has demonised women, reporters, Mexicans, Muslims, environmentalist and I am sure I have missed many more. This type of incite to hatred has real, and often fatal, consequences.
Here in Australia the same rhetoric is coming from the One Nation Party, and has already been popularised by the UK Independence Party leading to the vote to leave the European Union. Five years ago, these groups with extremist views still existed, but they were on the fringe, with a tiny following. Now they are setting the agenda, drawing a sizeable following, and having centre-right parties borrow from their policies.
Humanity is undoubtedly undergoing a crisis of faith. Not religious faith, but faith in the principles of kindness, tolerance and honesty; principles that underline the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is increasingly being ignored in favour of commercial and political interests.
Anyone who thinks that this is purely an ideological issue and part of the small swing from left to right that happens with democratic elections should look at the treatment of the members of the media that reported on the Women’s March held alongside the inauguration. Trump is set on ushering in the era of post-truth, alternative-facts and double-speak.
It is not that analysts, commentators and human rights activists are not pointing out the problems, it just seems that their words are lost in the wind of hate-speech and ignorance.
The one light I can point to is the behaviour of the US National Park Service tweeting about climate change in defiance of Trump (another great article). I suspect that a generation of young people inspired by Leslie Knope have joined the Park Service, and hold Leslie’s values as their own. Life imitating art in a glorious way.
As paralyzed as I feel, I must continue to record what is happening and how I feel about it, just like the last of the colonists on Miranda.