It’s been some year. For all we’ve seen on TV and the Internet, the worst of what’s happened remains mostly off screen, in the forests and plains of Africa where hundreds of thousands, mostly children, have died this year for the lack of resources that the U.S. had provided for so long, only to have Trump and his movement suddenly cut them off.
A glimpse of the horror that Trump and company have set upon us can be seen in the withheld 60 Minutes 15-minute segment on the atrocities at the CECOT maximum security prison in El Salvador.
Just as the opposite of good is evil, so the opposite of empathy is cruelty, whether it takes the form of nailing a cat to a garage door, raping a child, or doing many of the things that this administration is undertaking.
Now with the prospect of initiating a war, it seems hardly worth worrying about the obsessive self-ingrandizement component of the savage mental illness that is now running our country, like the renaming of the Kennedy Center, a step much like writing one’s own name on someone else’s tombstone. But it is a compulsive move with a collateral consequence being a deep, deliberate insult to all the categories of people that Trump readily admits he hates.
The cartoon is of an orchestra conductor who opens the music score he is to conduct and finds the work’s title changed to “Fifth Symphony by Donald Trump and Gustav Mahler.” Or, there’s the one of a woman complimenting another in a solid black t-shirt saying she loves the shirt’s depiction of the “redacted version of the Epstein files.”
Such humor matters in a time, especially as traditional holiday music fills the air echoing themes of universal love and care for others, when, were one not to laugh, one would cry.
It is becoming clear that overcoming this evil is not done with one silver bullet, but by a relentless, persistent effort at chipping away. Patience with persistence is required.
But also heed what the Rev. William J. Barber II, co-founder of the national Poor People’s Campaign, is saying these days: “Please don’t blame Trump for where we are now. Name all who have lied for him, upheld him, covered for him, put false religion around him, and enabled him. If we end up in war, there must not be selective amnesia. Anyone who didn’t speak up bears the blame.”
The fissures in the Turning Point movement arising over alternate tastes in its agenda for hate are a natural “falling out among thieves” consequence of staking lives and identities on angry labeling and judging based on perceived differences.
It’s a law of nature for evil to rip away at tendencies for common ground. Sadly, on the progressive side, the same infection threatens to fester and blow apart the unique opportunity that now exists to expunge the world from the MAGA menace. There is a reason why the word, “solidarity,” has been so important to modern movements against oppression.
But the impulse to division is not as inherent on the progressive side as it is on the other. Still, the kind of resolute, firm and strident determination that is now required if MAGA is to be stopped must be deployed to act against any divisiveness in the ranks of the anti-MAGA coalition.
Common ground is, after all, fundamentally rooted in the scientific fact of the human propensity for empathy, to identify and relate to the needs of others. This is a common ground that greed and the other deadly sins rip people away from through the elevation of slimy cravings of the self against and to the exploitation of others.
If there is a defining flaw in the major media’s role today, it is in its preoccupation to find “news” in the divisions among us, and to exploit egos it can elicit as spokespersons and leaders to that ill-begotten end.
The truth is that the two political forces in America today are pro-MAGA and anti-MAGA. That is how it should play out in the next year if it’s done right, and divisions to not wind up ripping apart the anti-MAGA side.
