by: Marceline Donaldson
What an incredible day!
I have spent a lot of time and energy being angry over my lifetime because of the fights I have had to engage in just to survive. And at other times I have had to engage in even more fights because others were being treated with great injustice and I seem to be constitutionally unable to stand by and watch or turn away.
It has been extreme pain at many points in my life as I saw and experienced racism, sexism, xenophobia, ethnic cleansing and so much more.
My thoughts about my country wavered during those times because I saw a side to these United States that left me wondering – why? So many talked about how great we were and the mythology connected to these United States was awesome. However, my experience didn’t live up to, nor see, nor experience that greatness, because I was not one of those deemed to be equal to and my talents were not even recognized because my color and my sex got in the way.
I have had things stolen in the tradition of what has happened to minorities over the hundreds of years. Recently, I have had people try to push me around the way they haven’t for a decade or more.
Especially recently. the bigotry I thought was mitigating with the presidency of our first African American president clearly was growing stronger under Donald Trump, with the strongest bigotry I have ever seen in this country produced and cultivated by its president and his administration.
I recently experienced a lot of the kind of racism and sexism I thought left decades ago and while bigotry itself was not gone, I tried to believe it was in the process of being run out of town.
What I didn’t experience in this life, I experienced as I studied history. – Reading and learning about the horribleness of the lives of so many others because of the bigotry that existed and exists in these United States. The worst of it was the denial. It is more than enough to experience bigotry and have your economic, social, cultural life limited and changed by that bigotry that I experienced and that jumps out at you as you wander into the history of what went before. The worst of it is to have people get in your face and deny what you and they both know happened – it is the ultimate sell-out of humanity.
Today was an amazing and very cathartic time. The issue was bigotry – against those brown people who were so threatening. The mothers and children and babies who so riled up this country that its president established Internment Camps, Concentration Camps and Death Camps to turn around people coming to the United States hoping for asylum from what in many cases was horrendous and life threatening. To seek asylum and have that effort get you thrown in jail where you thought you would find freedom has to be excruciatingly painful and the end of life.
To experience the response of Donald Trump, the illegitimate president of these United States and his cabinet and administration as they all acquiesced either through their silence or actions, to what Trump was doing to the least of these. It has been an unbelievable time.
Today turned around my history. To see the outpouring, the numbers of people all across the country who responded and said by their presence this is not who we are nor is this who I am going to allow my United States to be nor how I am going to allow it to act.
Over 700 demonstrations against what Donald Trump has wrought was awesome. To talk to many of the people so demonstrating and to find out why they were out in the street on a 90 to 100 degree day to make their voices heard is the most encouraging and beautiful thing I have seen in a long time.
I hope all of those who struggled so long and so hard to bring these United States into a place of true democracy where we are all equal and we look out for one another were present today. It is not the easiest thing to do, especially when there are some 15 percent of the citizens in this country moving in the opposite direction and demanding that the United States follow the pattern set by the Nazi movement and the Hitlers of the world.
I didn’t intend to be a part of the demonstrations because I fell down the stairs and could hardly walk – but walk I did. As I sat nursing my foot which is swollen and ugly from the fall, I realized everything I have been about, everything I believe, everything I have worked so hard to see happen was breaking open across this country and I needed to be a part of all of that.
My foot probably won’t heal for a month after what I did to it today, but I don’t even feel the pain, the joy has overcome it all.
May we always be this country which turns out for what we believe and will not let what Donald Trump brought on and made so many children and their parents suffer because of his power, greed, control, fascistic dreams of his future and more win the day. He must be stopped and what he is using to maintain and expand his power must be destroyed.
He has brought about 1) trade wars 2) Isolationism and 3) set in place the structure of a severe depression which we will probably experience in just a few months. These are what is needed to turn a democracy into a despotic state. Trump has set those things in place and is moving these United States into the camp of other leaders like him who are also out to satisfy their greed, control, vicious tempers and more. Let us turn that around and continue to show we are determined to live free and equal not in chains to the likes of the despots who intend to feed on all of us.
God is good! And I can see God’s kingdom breaking in all over the world, in spite of the clouds of ferocious institutionalized hate, bigotry, greed, and those using religion trying to stop that beauty from coming through. It is far too late for that to succeed. History can’t be changed, but the present and the future certainly can and it takes all of us to bring about those changes. May I see you always just across the road working as hard as I am for the good of us all, especially the children, that precious generation which needs to see the light that we send to them and which they send along to others not yet born.
And on to Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community!
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Tags: Barack Obama, Bettina Network Hedge Schools, Donald Trump, Racism, Sexism
