An embarrassing reflection of us

By Jacques, d’Nalgar, December 13 2015

Why all the sanctimonious hand-wringing over Donald Trump’s latest bombastics?  Are we really that shocked when this unfiltered braggart harrumphs that the world’s Muslims must not be allowed to sully our exceptional, Christian America?

After all, isn’t that what most of us really want?  Sure, we may not say it in polite company, but eloquent mendacities are always lost in the cacophony of real-world actions.  And we’ve been loudly acting out our real feelings about Muslims for a long time now.  Almost a century of meddling in the Middle East to sate our unending addiction to oil.  At least two unnecessary wars that have now spawned ISIL and inspired world-wide terrors.  And at least seven decades of supporting colonial experiments and brutal regimes that scoff at quaint notions like human rights and egalitarian self-rule.  We don’t need Donald Trump to spell out how we really feel about this wretched, dusky refuse of a faraway teeming shore, these boogedy boogedy Muslims…

Fact is, our national pastime of fear and loathing isn’t limited to Muslims.  “Muslim” is just our latest code word du jour for any of the world’s homeless, tempest-tossed, huddled masses who aren’t lily-white, god-fearing good folk just like us.  If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve never liked any of them.

We don’t like those scattered remnants of our indigenous first peoples, who had the audacity to survive systemic attempts at wholesale extermination.  We definitely don’t like the descendants of all those Africans we brought over here, in chains, for slave labor.  To this day, we’re still trying to keep them from voting, and we routinely relegate them to second-class jobs, education, and justice.  And we sure don’t like those millions of brown-skinned people (with names like Jesus!) who routinely wander across our southern border to pick our crops, clean our homes, and patch our roofs.

So let’s skip all the hypocrisy and admit that Donald Trump is just an embarrassing reflection of us, and of what we have allowed America to become.