By Brandon Gage
I share these thoughts not to spread gloom and doom, but to just get this off my chest, because I know I’m not alone. Maybe talking about it can help us heal, even if we don’t yet have solutions.
I admit, I was never subject to the types of discrimination that minority communities and many LGBTQIAA people have experienced. But that isn’t what this piece is about.
I grew up in the 1990s in a wealthy, liberal suburb of Washington, DC. I had a relatively privileged upbringing - not that my parents had a lot of money, but my brother and I never needed for anything. We went to good schools, and the quality of our education was certainly better than average.
Being a white, Jewish kid in the 1990s meant society treated me well. Though we learned about our country’s horrific deeds of the past, like the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Chinese slave labor, and Japanese internment camps, it was more like hearing about another world, one that had been defeated and from which we had incorporated higher moral standards.
The United States, I and others were taught, was the beacon of freedom, hope, and opportunity for the entire world - the republic whose example all other western democracies sought to emulate.
The economy in the 1990s was booming, thanks to the advent of the Internet and the “tech bubble,” from which most of our modern conveniences, like cell phones, WiFi, GPS, and worldwide satellite communications, originated. We were flying high.
And then came September 11, 2001.
Sitting in my tenth grade biology class, roughly around 9:45 in the morning, our school principal threw on the PA system and began making an announcement, that up until writing this, I have never really talked about. And I suspect I’m not alone, even though everyone experienced the same thing.
Nearly twenty years later, recalling the images and events of 9-11 remains incredibly painful. I challenge anyone my age who lived through that day to speak aloud about specifics. Good luck.
“Terrorists have hijacked airplanes and flown them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,” my principal said. My teacher immediately turned the TV on, and moments later, the South Tower collapsed. We watched it live.
When the bell finally rang, after what seemed like an hour even though it had only been a mere ten minutes since the announcement, I made my way down to the choir room, where I typically spent the bulk of my time.
The North Tower continued to smolder, the video feed split between it and footage of a hole in a newly-renovated section of the Pentagon, which was directly across I-395 from my parent’s office. My mother later told me that American Airlines 77, the 757 that slammed into the building at over 500 miles per hour, shook her building like an earthquake. That plane was, supposedly, bound for the United States Capitol. I still marvel at the physics of it.
Then came the news that a fourth plane, United 93, had crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, amidst reports that passengers had overtaken the hijackers and diverted the plane away from its intended target, which we later learned was the White House.
As if watching planes flying into buildings and seeing those buildings crumble wasn’t enough of a shock to the senses, the footage of lower Manhattan included people leaping from the burning towers. Imagine how bad it must have been if the better option was to jump. A 14-year-old brain doesn’t have the capacity to process this. I’m not sure my 31-year-old mind can fully grasp it either.
I share these memories because they are forever embedded in my psyche, as they represent the day that the country I knew, the country that I was taught was the truth and light for the world, fundamentally changed forever.
A month later, the United States launched a retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan, which has become our country’s longest ever war. Seventeen months later, we invaded Iraq, which was arguably the worst foreign policy decision of the last century, or possibly ever. Only Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union, comes in a close second.
Neither Afghanistan or Iraq were responsible for the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people (11 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi), and our own government willfully ignored warnings that an attack was imminent. Immediately, we were being fed lies to fuel an aggressively hostile foreign policy that would forever redefine America’s role in the world.
Since that day, news in the United States changed from reports of a booming economy, to a constant barrage of why we should be afraid of anyone who isn’t white, especially if they happen to be Muslim.
The presidency of George W. Bush scattered embers over what was an inflamed and deeply divided population. His controversial election (or appointment) in 2000, followed by his narrow reelection in 2004, began to erode the trust many of us had placed in our institutions, since the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party, which until 2006 controlled all three branches of government, seemed intent on taking away civil liberties and undoing much of the social progress of the 20th Century.
Things were looking better after Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and we began making some good progress, however the racial underpinnings of our society began to resurface. In 2011, a New York City landlord and reality TV star accused Obama of having a fake birth certificate, sparking the racist “birther” movement in which millions of Americans convinced themselves that the president had been born in Kenya, rather than in Hawaii.
That boisterous, New York racist was elected President of the United States on November 8, 2016, and since then, being an American, no matter what your background, has become a constant assault on our senses of community, country, and self. The 2016 presidential election is a nightmare that just won’t end.
Being an American is fucking traumatizing.
The candidacy of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was anything but conventional, although I can hardly describe it as traumatizing. Most of us didn’t take him seriously, nor did a majority of voters choose him.
But here we are.
We have a president, and a majority party, that every single day work to destroy the very things that made this country, and its people, the envy of the world. We have a president who is an outspoken, documented, unapologetic racist. We have a Republican Party (for the most part) who views him not just as a commander in chief, but as a literal god, a golden calf if you will, who will purge our country of the “infestation” of people coming here for a better life, and in so doing, rain down economic prosperity like manna from heaven.
This week, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, intact thanks to the theft perpetrated by Senate Republicans during Obama’s last year in office, upheld the president’s immigration ban on people coming from war-torn Muslim countries - some of which, including Iraq, are quagmired in conflicts we fucking started.
And today, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the deciding vote legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015, announced his retirement, giving the president another chance to put another right wing loon on the nation’s highest judicial bench.
We have a resurging movement of white supremacy, which was emboldened and encouraged by the candidacy of the man who, on more than one occasion, refused to rent apartments to black people.
It’s absolute and utter insanity. And we’ve seen it before.
We have a president who is hoarding Central and South American migrants into concentration camps under the guise of a made-up external threat, no different from the tactic used by Adolf Hitler. We have a president who, according to his ex-wife, kept Mein Kampf and Hitler’s speeches in his nightstand. This is why the comparisons between the two tyrants are completely appropriate. Our president has studied that playbook.
We have a president who is so petty, so spiteful, that he rescinds regulations that protect the air we breathe and the water we drink, just so he can undo what the black guy did. We have a president who, I am wholly convinced, is utterly incapable of recognizing truth, let alone telling the truth. We have a president who puts himself above the law. We have a president who treasonously conspired with a hostile foreign nation to secure his own ascent to power. Whether he intended to win the election, or secure more real estate opportunities for himself, is, at this point, irrelevant.
It wasn’t until this president that I ever felt unsafe or threatened in my own country. The people in charge don’t think climate change is real. The people in charge don’t think women should have autonomy over their own bodies. The people in charge don’t think workers deserve a decent, living wage and access to health care. The people in charge think the United States was founded by and for heterosexual white Christians, all others be damned. The people in charge think that short-term corporate profits are how to measure economic success.
What is possibly most upsetting is the feeling that we’ve been sold a bill of goods - that the American dream is a fool’s errand. Higher education, for most, requires mountains of debt, only to land a job that only pays enough to service that very debt. American students rank some of the lowest in the world in reading, math, and science. We’ve seen a systematic pillaging of public education, which undoubtedly was designed to keep people stupid, poor, and afraid. In no state in the country can a full-time minimum wage worker afford a two-bedroom apartment. In many cases, obtaining health insurance means holding a job that drains people’s very soul and is monotonous and unfulfilling, and that only makes one person at the top fantastically rich.
That’s not freedom, friends. That’s fucking slavery. And if you think we still practice capitalism, I have a bridge in Alaska to sell you.
What the hell happened to us? Actually, nothing. The election of the 45th president didn’t change a thing. It revealed a deeply paranoid and exploited society, whose anger has been manipulated - brilliantly - at the wrong people. And now, the engineers of this budding fascist dystopia are scoring legislative and judicial victories at breakneck speed.
They have fully embraced authoritarianism. Our elections are compromised. Our justice system is anything but just. Our ecosystem is collapsing. I fear the powers of good and democracy are outgunned by a political movement that for decades has coaxed the public into believing that gutting social programs and subjugating society’s most vulnerable will “make America great again.”
I’m tired, I’m frustrated, and I’m unsure where I belong.