First off, who is the silent majority. To a lot of lower middle class white folks, its them. Obviously, they are not a majority unless you divide us into race and socioeconomic group. Then it's still not an actual majority, its just a bigger minority than the other divisions
Let's not do that. Let's not buy into those old standards.
The silent majority are all those people that usually are focused, not on politics or race relations or religious preferences because they are using all their energy to go to work, earn enough money to pay for shelter, food, clothing, and all the perks and advantages they can for their family--parents, children, significant other. They are consumed with their own lives, because living, doing their best for their loved ones, is a lot.
Sometimes its apathy or addiction or depression that stops us from keeping up with the world around us. More often it's just trying to survive that has consumed all our resources and we just have no fucks left to give.
But this last year, this pandemic, the protests, the multiple killings of unarmed black people, the tear gas and riot batons used against people carrying signs and waterbottles. Well, we are home. We are seeing it. And while those watching Fox News are not seeing what the rest of us see, it has taken the place of cooking for church dinners and ball games and driving to dance practice and piano lessons. It it on our social media and on our TV and Radio station. And it is shocking. It is not life as usual.
With 4 years of Trump's lies being told repeatedly with no restrictions, those of us that want to believe him, believe him completely, and those of us that never believed him because what he said changed with the wind, we are all suffering the effects of sensory overload and mental trauma.
For some of us, the rage started the day the electoral college elected a man with 3 million less votes than his opponent. A man that then proceeded to tell those people that really wanted to believe him, that those 3 million votes were illegal and fraudulent. A man that said such things out loud, knowing they were not true and the news ran with it without any fact checking, without any attempts to stop his lies. He made comments from day one about being president for 12 years and 20 years and visited with dictators alone so no one could hear his conversations. He fired his appointees for not doing everything he said, whether legal or not. He called female opponents by names that are usually reserved for use by 15 year old bullies, and implied rape was a victimless crime.
He showed absolute hatred for Islamic people (except for Saudi Arabian Royalty--he really liked them) and for Hispanic people unless they were working for cheap in his hotels. He ripped children from family at the borders, with no plan, no record keeping, and left them in fenced areas that looked more like dog kennels for shitty dog breeding farms.
And that silent majority that thought that if we voted for our representatives; those representatives and the constitution would keep the country running just like it always had.
Of course, it hadn't always worked that way. President Buchanan was the monkey wrench that caused Lincoln to end up in a civil war. The war of 1812 was a bit like falling asleep at the wheel after the revolution. The Great Depression was a result of the very rich wanting everything open, no laws impinging on their money making.
But, while people are expected to live into their 70's, children don't grasp those connections and patterns seen between those events; we don't really start seeing the patterns at all if we are part of the silent majority unless something wakes us up.
We get focused on our individual lives. We worry about being happy, being pretty or handsome, being successful, being married, being parents, or whatever thing that has taken up residences in our brains and our dreams, and those things are pretty time consuming.
If we are responsible, we vote. Or maybe we vote only when a candidate or issue really gets our attention. Or if we have nothing better to do that day, and in places with gerrymandering and voter suppression, we know we can't do anything about it and just try not to even think about it.
And we stay silent.
So who are these folks screaming like political animals right now? Why did we have the biggest voter turn out for this presidential election that has ever occurred?
Trump. Trumpism. White Nationalism and fascism and QANON and evangelical Christians that think God sent them a leader to take back this country.
He saturated the news, all of it, papers, tv, radio, social media, and the constant noise was hard to sleep through even for the busy and silent.
Then, a disease, still being ignored as no big deal by a large group making it harder to limit exposures, forced a lot of people to slow down. We spent more time with social media and reading and watching news. We spent less time running on the hamster wheel because much of the wheel was no longer open for business. And depending on the state, on the political party, on each of our race/ethnicity/personal self-image and whether or not we liked reality TV, we ended up choosing sides.
Now, both sides are raging. One because we only woke up enough to listen to our favorite TV personality, the other because that same personality was awakening in us fear from the stories that our parents and grandparents told us, about fascism, and racism and overthrown governments; old history class lessons were googled, and worst of all how much of an increase in hate we were feeling from our country and countrymen.
Rage is hard to control.
Ask the bullied school shooter.
Ask the brown person that can never do enough to actually succeed because there was never an opportunity before catching the attention of the justice system.
I don't have answers, but I do think that we need to stop publicizing lies. That is like pouring gasoline on the fire. And how much difference is there, really between publishing a lie and slander. I think we need to stop letting news outlet get by with opinion pieces that are all aimed at the same side---people need to see and hear both sides or we start to think that an opinion is a fact.
Maybe we need to NOT bring the hamster wheel all the way back online. All of us need to stay involved in our own governance.
And no group is the majority. We are all equally important. Hate, bullying, profiling, putting people in pigeonholes, needs to actively be combated not just denied---those things are our enemy. Who knows how many people have been destroyed by those things when nurturing all of them would have may have given us the next Michelangelo, Einstein, Mandela, Che Guevara, or Maria Tallchief, or Selena Gomez.
We have a representative government. They must speak for all of us, serve all of us for we ARE the silent majority--all of us.
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