Never have I ever!

It's a little like truth or dare--shades of old-school slumber parties.  It's usually a drinking game, leading to perhaps a little more openness than would be had if everyone was fully in control of their tongue.  It's a little like what many of us are thinking as we listen to the radio, watch the news and listen in at the water cooler since this last inauguration.

Never have I ever seen so many professional people openly happy about refugees being turned away.

Never have I ever seen so few people horrified about militarized policing of the protesters of Big Money using First Nation Lands and endangering all our water.

Never have I ever seen openly bigoted people recommended for the Attorney General position.

Never have I ever seen a president flippantly insult the heads of states of other countries--both ally and enemy.

I could play this all day without repeating myself with less than a month of executive actions to drawn on.

I would have thought that many of the people that voted for our current president would be worried by now, but after the silence--like that strange green-lighted, windless moment before the tornado hits--the first few weeks after the election, they are opening up.

They are "bout time someone stopped those people from coming in here", and clapping each other on the back.  They are, "bout time that damn coon was out of there and a real man that knows what he is doing is back at the helm."  They are eager to arrest all those protester's--hopefully using deadly force.  They are ready to blow all those muslims back to hell.  They are ready for their jobs back, making good money, and their good, white schools without that crazy science about climate change and evolution--what are we, a bunch of monkeys?

Never  have I ever...

Buutttt.....  "tell the truth and shame the devil" as the saying goes.

Because, while we have liked to pretend that our communities and families were not ever like that,  I  heard a lot of it.  When I was a child.  (A pretty small child).

Much of America was not totally devastated when President Kennedy was shot.  Some of them were downright ecstatic, others merely certain that now the craziness could go back to normal.  (A Catholic?  as president?  we are all going to hell)  They weren't sorry when his brother was killed either.  Some of them cheered--actually cheered when MLK was shot and stopped trying to start a race war.  A few of the smarter ones actually feared that it also might be what started the long feared race war.  A very few actually realized at the time that a great and righteous man had been murdered for trying to right wrongs.  Those people were not that vocal in my little community.

The 1960's, the hippies and yippies and civil rights movement and black panthers and antiwar protestors  were destroying our country.  It was all going to lead to a race war and a commie take over and nuclear winter.  And they had thought their way of life was safe after FDR died.

Darn FDR, who was heading toward a lifetime presidency--if he hadn't died.  Who cares that he kept the great depression from being even worse than it was.  Without him, we might have done like Europe--gone all fascist leaders and xenophobic and throwing people that weren't white like they wanted into camps, concentration camps, death camps.

Oh wait--we did that with the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.
We did that with those people that had lived here thousands of years before we arrived on the shores of this continent.
And now, we want to do that with all those of the Islamic faith.

And don't forget those illegal aliens--if they aren't here to work as domestics or pick our strawberries and haul our hay, they need to get right back down to Mexico.

And---they need to do all that speaking ENGLISH.

We brought in poor Chinese people to work our west coast mines and build railroad.  We brought in the Irish and they took those Copper jobs in Boston and New York.

And while we play the hero of WWII---we didn't take those Jewish immigrants trying to get out before the death camps.

We were antisemitic, too.

Our Anglo-saxon roots run deep and they are not very tolerant of others. 

There is truly not much we haven't done here.

We started with a revolution--not to give everyone equal rights but to keep our colonial rich men from having to pay taxes to the king---thus allowing them to profit even more from the sweat of their peasantry.

There was not a single colonial rich man in my family.  But the revolutionary soldiers in my ancestry is pretty extensive.  Their fighting fully qualified my ancestors for free land in dangerous places as long as they continued to move west.  The good land own by wealthy and civilized men was not to be shared.

We had a giant civil war--not to free slaves because it was so wrong, but to stop the south from being able to benefit from slave labor over the northerners that felt slavery was wrong--for religious reasons  therefore requiring them to pay a little of their profits to their workers.  It was also all about the money.

I had family on both sides of that one.  It tore the country apart.  It was definitely more polarized then than even now.  And the reconstruction was so full of corruptions that most political leaders were known for that and not for their great leadership abilities.

But---
Never have I ever seen us closer to starting World War III than now.

The barroom brawlers are now in charge---not the most peaceful, collaborative group of people to keep us our of war.

Our Fearless Leader is being whispered to by a man that is both excellent at using propaganda to sway people to his way of thinking and making those most fearful, most jealous, most hate-filled feel justified at doing anything to get back what they think they lost in some imagined past.

We have twitter, great for snarky comments, sarcastic retorts and ear-pleasing slogans, but not that great for full, 2-way communication or even 1-way education.

We have reality TV--where instead of a plot or storyline we get to pretend that the crappy actors are just regular people acting spontaneously.  (This may be the source of the birth of the alternative fact)

Meanwhile, some of us are worried about everything that seemed to be logically expected before the election.
Can I ever retire?
If I retire, will I have healthcare?
Will my property taxes allow me to stay in my home?
Will the cost of water be too high to purchase?
Will the food be affordable?
Will there be real elephants and bees and rabbits when my great grandchildren are born?
What is the easiest route out of this country if we turn into Syria?

Never have I ever thought such things would worry me about my future.