I've spent the past 3 hours trying to summarize my feelings about Charlottesville but I can't.
All the same emotions of anger, defeat, frustration, empathy, anger at others for their lack of empathy, etc. that I felt while watching Ferguson go down are back, and exacerbated.
Today the President of the United States of America could not call a spade a spade. The dog whistle of all dog whistles. Terrorism is a term exclusively for colored perpetrators now, apparently. We have to consider both sides, they say, in perhaps the least ambiguous act of domestic terrorism, hate speech, and prejudice in the new millennium. It's 2017. Donald Trump is the President of the United States. There's a white supremacist, ethnocentrist, violent rally going on with a side of domestic terrorism that getting international attention and the response from authorities relative to Ferguson is miniscule.
I'm not saying anything new either, and that's the really scary part. There is a progressive development, radicalization, and galvanization of white supremacy movements going on that have been energized by Trump. This isn't the last we've seen of it, and frankly, the smartest minds in the world from the social to political scientists don't know what to do and are scrambling to figure it out while they continue to bubble, murder, and oppress according to a dogmatic and self-righteous view of the world.
Humans' capacity for harm hasn't been this salient in the west for a while, but now we're getting reacquainted once again, and it is feeling uncomfortably familiar uncomfortably quickly. Honestly, shit like this really challenges my beliefs in concepts like universal human empathy, critical thinking ability, and conscience. I don't personally believe in inherently bad people, but if there's an argument for it, today's events are a damn good one and have me questioning everything that I think I know.
IDK even know if this is the right thread for this but the car stuff cemented it for me.
In some ways, I fear that in the same way that the gun debate ended with Sandy Hook, the BLM debate may have ended at Ferguson. Or, hell, the coloured lives matter debate may have ended decades to centuries before that.