(This is my first post in 2-1/2 years; I must be really pissed about something!)
Apparently, I possess a compulsive behavior that first manifested itself when I was 12 years old and the neighborhood bully showed up below my treehouse wanting to beat up one of my younger friends who was with me; I felt compelled to stop him. He climbed the tree and was trying to pull himself up onto the floor of the treehouse when I threatened to bash his knuckles with the claw hammer that was in my hand. We were 20 feet above the ground and it could have been deadly. We finally opted for fists -- at ground level -- and ultimately, I spared the little guy a beating.
When I was an older teenager that emotion rose again when I spotted a prankster who had stolen the purse of his female friend and was taunting her as she struggled to get it back. I circled behind him, grabbed the handbag and handed it to the girl without saying a word, then turned and walked away as they both looked after me with surprise, one with a little more appreciation than the other.
Since then and until the era of Donald Trump, I could count on one hand the times I have felt compelled to defend the underdog against a bully, and they have all been verbal confrontations of mostly ideologies, and no more fists... or hammers.
We now have a president who is the champion of the disrespectful. Donald Trump ran on a platform of scorn for political correctness much to the delight of his fans who cheer and jeer from the sidelines every day as they follow their favorite bully around the virtual playground while he mocks and calls names on Twitter and insults from the rose garden or the political platform and kicks sand in the eyes of the weakling.
In a land of immigrants, he is disrespectful of immigrants, disrespectful of minorities and the underpriveleged and the handicapped and the needy, disrespectful of science, disrespectful of his own intelligence community and medical experts (which has turned out to be deadly in the pandemic). He is disrespectful of the elderly and the unhealthy who can't afford their own health insurance. He is disrespectful of the planet, and that's only the beginning: he is disrespectful of the Rule of Law and desecrates the Office of the President daily. In true bully form, he is disrespectful of just about everything and everybody who doesn't pat him on the back or cheer him on.
Trump is the fulfillment of a dream for right wing conservative talk show personalities. He is the Fox News president. Every morning he feeds on the angst from Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and turns it into a demeaning Tweet before breakfast, and they are happy to keep the cycle going. I'm sure they are aware of the influence they wield over this guy and they are not wasting it with gestures of good will or kindness.
Years ago, I arrived at a construction site when I was in the business, and the workers were listening to Rush Limbaugh on the worksite radio. I was immediately startled by the sarcasm and disrespectful tone of the commentary. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have birthed and fed a culture of disrespect for decades.
If political correctness is essentially the struggle for equal rights for all, then they are the bullies who would like to keep that from happening. Though they want every school child to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every school day with hand over heart, they do not really want liberty and justice for ALL. As bullies they are a powerful and unsympathetic bunch who delight in liberty and justice for themselves and people who are like them but not for others.
A few weeks ago the Trump administration implemented a policy that would deport any foreign university students who had to attend all their classes online due to the pandemic. There was no good reason for it; it was unfair and unsympathetic (it was reversed three days later). When I complained about it on Facebook, guess what the first reaction of Trump's fans was? Similarly unsympathetic, even though they knew we've had international students living in our home for the last three years and bullying them into leaving the country one semester before graduation was senseless and mean-spirited.
One of Joe Biden's campaign slogans speaks of "fighting for the soul of America". So what IS the soul of America and what happened to it? I'll tell you. I think good will and common decency and respect are the soul of America. It's the stuff on which a representative democracy runs best. It's the realization that we all ultimately came from somewhere else.
In many of us, it has been squashed by the sarcastic and selfish us-versus-them mentality cultivated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson, and Trump is the ultimate incarnation of their efforts although they didn't create him; he has been a self-made arrogant cutthroat CEO from the start who thrives on firing people.
He would fire the poor if he could. He would fire black lives. He would like to fire peaceful protestors. He would delight in firing immigrants, especially those coming from what he calls poorer "shithole countries". He would fire solar power and electric cars if he could. That's just mean.
He is our National Bully, and I will stand up to him if I have to. And like Jesus standing up to the religious bullies of His day, I don't have to be nice about it.
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Okay, so with this post I may have answered the puzzlings of a few of my friends who expressed surprise at the fervor (and language) with which I defended the foreign students a few weeks ago. It's compulsive behavior with me; bullying makes me mad, and I will always stand up for the underdog. What that looks like right now is just my venting on social media and my blog; I really don't have any power to stand up to Trump except to vote in November, no hammer in hand. I hope there are enough voters left who believe in decency and freedom and justice for ALL to finally expel the bully and his sidekicks from the national playground.
