We are long overdue to believe America when it shows us who or what it is:
- It is a country in which growing income inequality is ignored or dismissed as the wealthiest class continues to grow in wealth and power.
- It is a country that jealously protects the interests and comforts of white supremacy, while minimizing or erasing the persistent reality of systemic racism and xenophobia.
- It is a country that would prefer to have a twice impeached, septuagenarian, convicted felon, who lost the last election and has never accepted that reality, who incited violence at the nation’s Capitol building after that loss, and who verbally attacks the most vulnerable in society, and scapegoats struggling migrants and refugees, serve in the highest office in the land rather than elect a qualified woman of color who happens to be the sitting vice president of the United States.
- It is a country that collectively refuses to: accept the hard truths of its past and present, to reckon with the complicity of many people and has increasingly sought to enact laws to ban books or curriculum that would educate future generations about these facts.
This is what America is today. Trump’s election has made that clear and, perhaps finally, impossible to deny.
Jeanné Schulte Matthews
Oak Park