Welcome to the New America

Every morning , I wake up, grab my phone, and check to see if America is still in a coma. Sure enough, it is. I sit silently on the toilet, say my prayers, and check my phone again. Now, granted, it has only been 20 minutes, but in the Trump Universe, 20 minutes can be a year. But rest assured, we are still spinning out of control.

20 years ago, all this uncertainty would have given me a horrible anxiety attack. Hot, mind pacing back and forth, sweating, am I good enough to go to heaven with rapid, shallow, breathing. I would love to have gone into my medicine cabinet and pulled out a Xanax or two, but my psych med provider doesn’t believe in Benzos to treat anxiety. I have to get myself out of this tailspin. I think practical, I think of history. If you notice the news has not yet claimed that we are living in unprecedented times. America has been here before, and we got out of it. The fear is that perhaps this tumultuous time is here to stay. But I have faith in us. I have faith that the common man is paying attention and is refusing to give up this fight. A fight that is going to go on for 4 years. But again, we have been here before. Think about it!

We have the McCarthy era blacklist (AKA The Red Scare) in which thousands of people were taken out of the public eye or challenged in such a way it lead to their demise all because they were thought to be communist sympathizers. This was led by the HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Act. This committee was tasked with investigating the entertainment industry. People lost their jobs, careers, and homes all because they were thought to be communist sympathizers who wanted to overthrow the government. People like Lena Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Humphrey Bogart, Harry Belafonte, and Paul Robeson. Not to mention, Bayard Rustin and the most famous, Martin Luther King Jr.

You have the Japanese internment camps where over 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were U.S. citizens, were relocated to these “camps”. They lost their businesses, homes, and dignity. This was their country, and America told the Japanese Americans that America did not trust them. They did try to deport them, but until then, it was much easier to put them in camps until America could figure out the logistics. Sound familiar? I bet it does. But wait, there’s more!

Manifest Destiny! Ever heard of it? It is the ideology that the United States was put here by God to spread the ideals of this great country. From sea to shining sea. Unfortunately, there were these people who were already here, and they were getting in the way. So let us give them a piece of land and let them fight it out, and to make it a little more fun, let’s get them drunk. And they did!

What about the time they brought those people over in ships and stacked them up the way you would do lumber. AND to make this more ironic, let’s change these people, (which was the reason we brought them to this country, because they needed workers to work the plantations. They needed humans.) into property. On this continent, they are no longer human beings but property. That is, until politics came into play. The South wanted more members House of Representatives, so they wanted to count their slaves as people, thereby making them citizens. The North said, “Hell to the NO!” Slaves are not citizens, and ya’ll can’t count them in. They had to come to a compromise. And that compromise was a clause in the Constitution of 1787, which stated that enslaved persons could only be considered 3/5th of a human being. That is, until the Civil War. Once again, we were used as pawns in America's war with itself. I feel like you have heard that one before. Yeah, you probably have… You know why? BECAUSE IT’S HAPPENING RIGHT FUCKING NOW! We are watching all these things unfold right now.

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – Winston Churchill.

America, I know you are watching. I know you see the case that I have just laid out and how we are not living in unprecedented times, but a time that will forever define us. We can not run from the task that is in front of us, but lean in and stoke the fires of change. Demand that our voices are heard and refuse to cower in the shadows, hoping someone else will take the reins and lead us not into oblivion. Together, we can define the difference between right and wrong. Together we can be Rosa sitting on that bus refusing to give up her seat because she was too damn tired. Together we can breathe new life into this Trump Era and not forget what made us great in the first place, because it was not him. It was our ingenuity, it was difficult conversations, it was our love of country that brought us together. Let this be that time. When asked, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Let us answer with a resounding yes. Let that define us at this time. Let this be our New America!