I think the most unnerving thing about this election isn’t limited to gay marriage, although I am gay and this effects me most directly. It’s the things Trump has said about all minorities. Registering Muslims + re-establishing law and order (in isolation could be innocuous but not along side these other things, instead looks like code for suppressing dissent over police shootings of unarmed black men) + statements re gays + choice of Mike Pense as VP + statements re women + all the white nationalist re-tweets. Any one of theses things on their own, I could dismiss. But all together? It’s a pattern.
And then when I add his statements on the media re strengthening libel laws and barring access to journalists he doesn’t like, his admiration for dictators and their ability to act unilaterally, and his cavalier attitude toward use of nuclear weapons, and the ways in which the executive branch’s powers were expanded under W? I can only come to one conclusion. It’s that American voters, the same who claim their love of freedom and the constitution, would give away their guarantee of freedom and perhaps their democracy to exclude anyone different from themselves and a false promise of jobs that will never come back.
Now, I don’t know that Trump will make good on the things he said. But you see, I understand something I didn’t before. It’s that for many of my fellow Americans, the American dream is only for them. And that they would rather risk throwing it away than sharing it with me or anyone they deem as different. And this reality? It’s more painful than I can say. And now that I see it so clearly, I know that’s it’s been there all along. And I have been dreadfully naive. And regardless of what Trump does and does not do, I won’t be able to see my fellow Americans the same way again.
Kate's Queen City Notes 