Is Donald Trump’s Gift To Me
I’ve tilted this personal photo of Martin Luther King’s Lorraine Motel assassination site because this period in my country’s history unnerved my innocent early adulthood vision of the United States — that my country was good and only did good in the world. It was truly exceptional and guileless. Slavery was an aberration; the Indians were the bad guys. God — Blessed America.
By this period, I mean 1968 and 1969, and these events.
March 3, 1968: James Earl Ray murders Martin Luther King, Jr.
June 5, 1968: Sirhan Sirhan murders Robert Kennedy.
August 26–29, 1968: Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police beat protesters.
Fall 1969: Seymor Hersch published a story about the My Lai massacre by soldiers of the United States that happened in the spring of 1968.
Many other things happened inside and outside U.S. borders in the late sixties, but these discombobulated me at the time. I know that because two memories are so easily recalled.
*
“What is happening to America?” my father exclaimed the day after Robert Kennedy’s death. It was the summer after my first year of college. I was 19, and my dad had just come home from work. I had never heard him speak with such emotion, and I could sense the uncertainty in his voice. Two assassinations. When your father is unsettled, you are unsettled; at least I was.
The second recollection occurred a year later, in the fall of 1969. I was a college junior majoring in Sociology. After a class with Keith Fernsler, my favorite professor, I had just joined a group of friends. One friend, Joe, said, “Paul, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Our Sociology class had just been discussing Hersch’s article on the My Lai Massacre, and I hadn’t realized our class’s discussion of the killing of a hundred civilians had visibly affected me.
King and Kennedy were dead. American soldiers gunned down women and children. If we looked closer, what else would we find?
Three years later, Watergate and a corrupted Presidency; five years later, defeated, America withdrew from Vietnam.
*
I’m a romantic. I want Romeo and Juliet to live happily ever after. The same is true for my country. After WE re-elected Barack Obama in 2012, I thought — probably mostly felt — America had loosened itself from its exclusionary past. Imperfect as it had been, it had finally lived up to its ideals. The WE now included so many voices that had been silenced. The USA could be one large, loud, chaotic, multiethnic family — finally, a Democratic model for the world.
My favorite Martin Luther King jr quote has always been, of course, a romantic one.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
It turns out it’s a long arc. And it’s been flattening.
*
Today is the first full day of Donald Trump’s second term. Among other things, he pardoned all 1500 January 6th insurrectionists.
Romeo and Juliet died by suicide.
My beloved country may be doing the same.
Innocence narcotizes and blinds. And has nowhere to hide in Trump’s America.
Seeing this traumatizes and liberates.
It’s time for me to grow up.
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Reader Comments
Thank you for articulating what so many of us are feeling, Paul. I hope you’ll find comfort that there are others of us out here (quite a few, I think) feeling as crushed as you are. Maybe there’s a way to be realistic (perhaps even to live under a publicly sanctioned fascism) and still work toward justice and love. I’m watching and hoping to learn how.
Thanks for the comment, Tanya. I hope you are well. Mr. Trump will try to do everything he said he would. Fortunately, he has no filter. No imagination. No ambiguity. Unfortunately, many people will be hurt.