My adopted US homeland should be wary of making the same mistakes.
Though the electorate at this moment is sensibly focused on achieving a victory that will grant some reprieve and solace, such an urgency should not postpone the need for an overdue reckoning with the dark imperfections in our history and national character that generated the conditions for the republic to be in such dire peril.
Those conditions, enabled by those who enabled Trump and ignored his danger, his nastiness, his serial mendacity, will probably endure well beyond the day (if it comes) when he leaves the White House. We will be left to contend with the worst traits of the US’s past that he exalted and exacerbated: the imperial arrogance, the nativism and misogyny, the ecological degradation, the assault on minority and workers’ rights, the myth of exceptionalism.
That is the somber lesson that Chile yesterday and today whispers to us from afar. Only a profound and painful self-examination of our identity, what the splendid guardians of this experiment that started 250 years ago are demanding, can help to stave off the ominous possibility that years from now the country will be facing a repetition of the current terrifying crisis.
Un día de ventana abierta
Mi vecino vino a verme
Estaba llena de desilusión
Me miró en los ojos, y me dijó
Ya dijimos no, pero el sí estaba en todo
Todo lo que hay
On a day of open windows
My neighbor came to see me, filled with disillusionment
He looked me in the eyes and told me:
We already said no
Yet the “yes” lingers on
In everything that is
From Chilean-American artist Nicolas Jaar
(The Yes/No refers to the referendum vote that nominally ended the Pinochet dictatorship.)
Only a profound and painful self-examination of our identity, what the splendid guardians of this experiment that started 250 years ago are demanding, can help to stave off the ominous possibility that years from now the country will be facing a repetition of the current terrifying crisis.
Sooo… Not happening. No small part of Trumps coalition of fuckwits were people that were made to be furious about any self-examination. They called us traitors and people who just hate America. They claim, while we’re currently fucking doing it, that America was never imperialist, never subjugated other nations forcing our will onto them to extract their resources. They deny the crimes of slavery and essentially any negative aspect of our past. Any self-examination will only be done by people that already understand who we were and what we still contend with and while that process happens the Reich wing media, the propagandist twitter/YouTube grifters, will all pounce on it and again rile up the conservative base, pointing their anger at “crazy communists who lie about our past and hate America.”
Hell asmongold the Reich wing fucking cancer on YouTube already said as much, it’s his “job” to piss off right wingers enough by showing them this stuff to get them voting how he wants them to. You may think someone like him is irrelevant, but after a couple of hours, not days, he has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views. 800k on some shit video about the new “Goldstein” to hate.