Tag Archives: Trump

An open letter to Trump: Stop the hatred.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Edit: Just after posting this, I saw that Mr. Trump had said something like this on “60 Minutes.” That’s good… but it’s not enough. A targeted  and specific message is needed.

Dear President-elect Trump:

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I don’t know if you concern yourself with events on the ground among the “little people.”
In the week since your election, the news has been full of some terrifying and truly disturbing events. In a list compiled on Twitter by Insanul Ahmed:

  • Students as Southern Illinois University put on blackface and posed in front of a Confederate flag
  • A group of guys yelled, “Time to get out of this country, Apu!” at a Middle Eastern-looking man at a gas station
  • A woman wearing a scarf was told, “Your time’s almost up, girlie.”
  • A Trumpkin pulled a knife on a Muslim woman near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • A white person called a black man a “nigger” and said he should be picking cotton
  • Students at Lehigh Valley High School were chanting, “Cotton-picker, you’re a nigger”
  • A white man approached a woman who appeared Mexican and said, “I can’t wait until Trump asks us to rape your people and send you over the biggest damn wall we’re going to build. Go back to hell, wet back,” and threw his cup of water in her face while flipping her the bird
  • A group of white men followed a woman wearing a dress onto the subway, yelled, “Grab her by the pussy!” and then proceeded to do so
  • Students at Wake Forest University were running around shouting, “NIGGER!” inside the residence halls
  • A group of white men confronted a black woman at a gas station and said, “How scared are you, you black bitch? I should just kill you right now…you’re a waste of air!” and another said, “You’re lucky there’s witnesses or else I’d shoot you right here.”
  • A black woman in Queens, NY was asked to go to the back of the bus
  • An LGBT couple found a note on their car saying, “Can’t wait till your ‘marriage’ is overturned by a real president. Gay families = burn in hell. Trump 2016”
  • High school teens yelled at a black woman to go back to Africa
  • A white man told an Asian woman at a gas station, “We won. Now get the fuck out of my country.”

Whether it was your intention or not, whether you want to admit it or not, you started this firestorm of hate with an implicit message that immigrants, Muslims, or anyone who is “other” or “less than” are not welcome in this country.

☞ And only you can put it out. ☜

I’m probably not wrong to suggest that most of your supporters are as appalled by this kind of behavior as I am. That these are the acts of the lowest common denominator of ignorance, hatred, and willful stupidity.

But these acts of horror are being committed in your name. And as President of our nation, the buck stops in the same office occupied by Harry Truman. With you.

There is only one way to stem the tide of this horror, which will only increase as the bigoted and the ignorant become more and more emboldened by the message that they heard during your campaign.

You spent countless millions of dollars courting the discouraged, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised, demonizing your political opponents. It is time to get in front of those same people who voted for you and personally tell them that acts of racism and hatred are not part of your platform. That they need to stop. That if they don’t stop, they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for hate crimes.

You’ve got the money, and for you it would be chump change. Get that message out there.

Do this, and even though I didn’t vote for you, you will have taken an important step to becoming “my president.” Do it not, and there is no way you can be president for “all Americans.” Do it not, and you will reap the whirlwind in a political backlash that you and the GOP may not recover from during this century.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

A visit to a dark corner of my soul

Posted on by The Old Wolf

One of my Facebook friends just posted the following question:

“Just a thought….who does the Muslim world and ISIS support for president?”

The obvious answer is “Clinton” – the implication being that Trump would unleash Hell on Islamic terrorists and nuke them back to the stone age, or something similar.

In reality, Daesh does not support anyone for president, because Daesh does not believe in Democracy – but rather in Shari’a law under theocratic rule. If the extremists had their way, New York City might look like the image below, which appeared shortly after 9/11:

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The problem with jingoism and xenophobia is that they know no bounds and do not require facts… just a gut-level fear of the unknown, of the different. Hence Donald Trump’s calls for the exclusion of all Muslim immigrants to the US, deportation of Muslims, issuance of identity cards to Muslims – all these have resonated with a segment of American society who have been terrorized by the terrorists.

A digression:

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In the episode of Star Trek, the Next Generation entitled “The Survivors,” Kevin Uxbridge (brilliantly played by John Anderson) portrays a Douwd, an immortal being with godlike powers who fell in love with a human woman. When his wife was killed by a consummately evil race of beings known as the Husnock, Uxbridge explained:

I saw her broken body. I went insane. My hatred exploded. And in an instant of grief… I destroyed the Husnock… You don’t understand the scope of my crime. I didn’t kill just one Husnock, or a hundred, or a thousand. I killed them all. All Husnock, everywhere. – Are 11,000 people worth… 50 billion? Is the love of a woman worth the destruction of an entire species?

This theme was echoed in Attack of the Clones, in which Anakin Skywalker tells Padmé Amidala about the Tuskens who kidnapped and killed his mother, “I killed them. I killed them all. They’re dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children too.”

The desire for ultimate vengeance upon those who have harmed us or our loved ones seems to run deep in the human heart, witness the Hatfields and the McCoys, the internecine conflicts of the Balkans, the Middle East conflicts, the Tutsis and the Hutus, and so many others.

And as I experienced that day of infamy in 2001 when our nation was stabbed to the heart by unspeakably evil men, my soul went to that darkest of places. On that day, had you offered me the Elder Wand and told me that by simply waving it, all Muslims everywhere would simply cease to exist, and every one of their holy sites would be reduced to a glowing lake of slag, I probably would have waved it without a second’s hesitation. Such was the depth of my anguish at the emotional insult of that day.

It has taken a long time, but I was obliged to take those sentiments and wall them up behind the barricade of reason.

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I admit that every time I see images of 9/11, or hear of a new atrocity committed in the name of Islam, I can still hear Fortunato’s bells jingling behind that wall. That day scarred my psyche for all time. I doubt I will ever fully heal, but I refuse to give in to the bestial urges.

With all of that in mind, I cannot support as president of this nation a man who would demonize fully one fourth of this world’s population for the actions of a few deranged and deluded madmen. Yes, those few are dangerous, and a threat to global security. But this is not Riyadh, or Tehran, or Darfur – this is America, and Muslims are as much a part of our country as the Catholic immigrants from Italy and Ireland, or the Jewish immigrants from the global diaspora. The enemy is ignorance, the enemy is extremism. We must be vigilant, but we must also be human.

The Old Wolf has spoken.