A worthwhile read from the Guardian expresses what many Americans -- hopefully it's the majority -- feel about the absolutely inexcusable reaction of our so called president to the tragedy of Charlottesville. But I am going to begin the way the editorial ends:
“The hope is that this dishonest and morally shaming moment will define Mr. Trump for sufficient decent Americans that he will not be trusted again. Sadly, the evidence of modern America gives too few grounds for optimism.”
Here are excerpted paragraphs:
“As George W Bush’s speechwriter put it this weekend, it is one of the “difficult but primary duties” of a political leader to speak for a nation in traumatic times. A space shuttle explodes, a school student goes on a shooting spree, a terrorist flies a plane into a building, a hurricane floods a city. When such things happen, Michael Gerson wrote in the Washington Post, “It falls to the president to express something of the nation’s soul.” Yet if Donald Trump’s words about the violent white extremist mobilization in Virginia on Saturday – which an underpressure White House was desperately trying to clarify on Sunday – are an expression of its soul, America may be on the road to perdition.
“The original United States of America was built on white supremacy. The US Constitution of 1787 treated black slaves as equivalent to three-fifths of a free white and gave no rights at all to Native Americans, who were regarded as belonging to their own nations. After the civil war, Jim Crow laws enforced segregation across the defeated south and comprehensively disfranchised African Americans for nearly a century. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler praised America’s institutional racism as a model from which Nazi Germany could learn. Only in the postwar period, and then slowly and incompletely, was meaningful racial equality pursued by the land of the free.
“Yet, while American racism has extremely deep and tenacious historical roots, without which the events in Virginia on Saturday cannot be properly understood, some large things have changed for the better over the past 60 or so years. Equal rights have been enforced. Equality has been embraced. America has elected a black president. It would be difficult to imagine any US president of this more recent period, of whatever party, who would not have responded to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville with anything except explicit condemnation and disgust. Any president, that is, until this one.”
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Mr. Trump utterly failed
in his primary duty to uphold equality
and speak the truth about the racist violence
that had taken place.
Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
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