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What You Don’t Want to be in Trump’s America

Life can be bright in America —
If you can fight in America;
Life is all right in America —
If you’re all-white in America.

West Side Story, film version October 1961.

1961 is way back in history, the year of John F Kennedy’s election, the Bay of Pigs, the first man in space, and lots of racism which was highlighted by the actions of the Freedom Riders, a bunch of studentswho traveled on buses from Washington, DC to Jackson, Mississippi “to challenge segregation on interstate buses and bus terminals.”  They were riding to deep trouble because the whites in the South realized that their racist supremacy was being threatened.

When they got to Anniston in Alabama on May 14 they “were met by a violent mob of over 100 [white] people. Before the buses’ arrival, Anniston local authorities had given permission to the Ku Klux Klan to strike against the freedom riders without fear of arrest. As the first bus pulled up, the driver yelled outside, ‘Well, boys, here they are. I brought you some niggers and nigger-lovers’.” And they were attacked and beaten up. No white person was charged with any infraction of the laws of the United States. Oh happy days!

Which brings us to 2019 and this week’s report about the death in New York of a black man called Eric Garner in 2014. It has taken five years to decide that the policeman who subjected Mr Garner to a choke-hold, a form of seizure that the police department “had banned more than two decades ago” should not be prosecuted.   Mr Garnet died from the effects of the choke-hold and the weight of other policemen piling on him and his last words were “I can’t breath” just before he was proved terminally correct.

The number of black men killed by police continues to rise and if you want to read the chilling details just go to NewsOne and see all about the 60 who have died recently.  You can also see and hear a Montgomery County Policewoman, Danielle Olsen, on camera on May 9 saying “Hey, we’re trying, you want to get out of here fast, right? Y’all niggas been tryin’ to somethin’. If you want to get out of here faster, we have more of our friends to help you get out faster.”

Back to Alabama!

And on to Washington, where the President of the United States also wants to get colored people out faster.  Out of the United States, that is.

Everyone knows the story about Trump’s racist tweets concerning the four colored female members of Congress, so there’s no point in going over it again, but his dramatic assertion of July 16 does merit mention, because when he declared that “Those Tweets were NOT Racist. I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” he was getting close to speaking a partial truth, for once.

Trump’s tweets reeked of bigotry, and he’s an unrepentant racist, but sure, he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body —  because he hasn’t got any bones at all and is morally spineless and totally devoid of any anatomical material that would make him upright, principled and honorable.

His inherent racism stems from the same source as his so-called bone-spurs that prevented him from going off like the 2.2 million draftees who had to hazard their lives in Vietnam, where over 50,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese and other Asians died in a useless war.  He was a yellow-bellied chicken-hearted coward in the 1960s and hasn’t changed a bit. Those of us who served in Vietnam (sure, I was an Australian, but we were all on the same side, however wrong we all were about a useless war) can have nothing but contempt for the lily-livered Trump and his ilk who partied on back home while so many of their contemporaries took their chances against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army.

As recorded in the New York Times,

“Back in 1968, at the age of 22, Donald J Trump seemed the picture of health. He stood 6 feet 2 inches with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished . . . But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels.”

Excuse me while I puke.

Remember US infantry officer Captain Humayun Khan who died in Iraq?  As reported in the UK’s Daily Telegraph,  Khan “was killed in 2004 by a suicide car bomb. He ran toward the suspicious vehicle after ordering his men back, and it detonated outside the gates of a compound where hundreds were eating breakfast. He was the only military casualty” and was awarded a Bronze Star. The gallant Humayun Khan was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, of immigrant Pakistani parents.

Humayun Khan’s father dared to speak at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, “criticising Mr Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and questioning whether he had read the US Constitution.”  He said, perceptively, that Trump had “sacrificed nothing and no one” and was then subjected to a tirade of abuse by the presidential candidate who wasn’t going to let a Muslim immigrant Gold Star parent say things like that.

Does that remind you of any other outbursts of invective involving a target with more courage in his left pinkie than Trump has in his entire boneless body?  His cheap vileness about John McCain struck a low, even for Trump, for after McCain had the temerity to criticise Trump for a racist outburst about Mexican migrants (“they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists”),  the bone-spur hero “went on a Twitter spree, hurling some 21 insults at McCain in just five days. On July 18 [2015] Trump escalated the tension when he said McCain was not a war hero ‘because he was captured’ and ‘I like people who weren’t captured’.”

It is very difficult to understand why so many Americans voted in favour of Trump, knowing that he sneered at a Vietnam war veteran who had been tortured by his captors, but that’s the way things are in the USA today. And there’s plenty of evidence that Trump’s nauseating attitude strikes a deep and popular chord with many millions.

In a packed arena at East Carolina University on July 17 Trump told the crowd that the four Members of Congress he had spitefully abused are nothing less than “hate-filled extremists who are constantly trying to tear our country down. They don’t love our country. I think, in some cases, they hate our country. You know what? If they don’t love it, tell them to leave it.” He specifically named Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who was born in Somalia, and in response to his venomous hate-filled tirade, the crown chanted “Send her back! Send her back!”

Trump is taking America right back to the era of racial intolerance, hatred and bigotry.  He’s Alabama-bound, and happy racist days are on the dark horizon.

I beg you, Americans: get rid of this man before he destroys your wonderful country.