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The 2020 Election Is Going to Be a Nightmare
One person cannot save us from this mess
When we learned that the Trump administration was kidnapping undocumented children from their parents and families, placing them in cages or setting them up for adoption, we should have been outraged into action.
When it was discovered that six migrant children had died in U.S. custody, we should have taken to the streets.
When the U.S. Department of Justice stood before the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco and argued that it was not the responsibility of the U.S. government to provide beds, toothbrushes, soap, and otherwise sanitary and safe environments for undocumented children as established in settlement agreements, we should have marched on Washington.
When the photos surfaced of the lifeless bodies of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old baby girl Angie Valeria washed up on the Rio Grande, the nation should have wept in pure shame.
We should be outraged into action, but instead, so many of us are crippled with an ever-present numbing fatigue. And understandably so. This is how it feels to live in Trump’s America.
Our Trumpian reality feels as if it were lifted from African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. In the novel, Butler created a dystopian America where global climate change coupled with an economic crisis led to social chaos. There are no government agencies. Social safety nets have been removed, slavery has been restored, and the Christian right has taken over. Oh, and to boot, the president’s slogan in the novel is “Make America great again.”
Any of this sound familiar? With each passing day I fear we fall further and further down the rabbit hole of a dystopia and closer into the realms of Butler’s imagined future for us.
Washington, it seems, has become the Bermuda Triangle for hope.
For two and a half years under the Trump regime, we have held out hope that someone, anyone, was going to save us. We have been so programmed by Hollywood to expect happy endings after an arduous ordeal that we have kept vigil in anticipation that the Mueller report would be…
