Wednesday open thread: Joe and Arnold stand against hate
Not gonna lie, friends. Yesterday was a black cloud day for me. The world got to be too much for me. Between my knee locking up and dark thoughts, it was a bear to get through.
But, I'm on the other side and back to my normal. Resilience is not a luxury for any of us. It's necessary. Resignation is also something we can't afford. Yes, we can take a day off. We can take a break. But we can't collapse into ourselves. We can't abandon the field permanently.
In the UK, the Home Secretary—analogous to our Secretary of Homeland Security—introduced a bill to severely target undocumented migrants. This minister, Suella Braverman, is the child of immigrants from Mauritius and Kenya. And she, along with her prime minister, Rishi Sunak—also a son of immigrants—want to pull up the ladder after them. When your country is going to hell because of your own actions in government, it's time to divert attention with the Little Englanders and point the finger at the poor brown people escaping violence and dystopia. Even if you yourself are brown. (And don't think this is only a British thing. South Africa has turned full xenophobic against migrants from other African countries, countries which supported the ruling African National Congress during its anti-apartheid struggle. Xenophobia knows no color barriers.)
So, I looked for light in the dark. And I found it.
I was going to write about President Joe Biden's speech at the commemoration of Bloody Sunday. And I shall post his speech in full. But this stuck out to me, in our current climate:
No matter how hard some people try, we can’t just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know.
We should learn everything — the good, the bad, the truth — of who we are as a nation.
In an era where many of our fellow citizens don't want to face the truth of our history as a nation, this seems like a radical statement. But that makes it no less true. No nation can expect to survive if it denies its history, both the bad and the good. We're are seeing this all over the world, as nationalist forces seek to paint a glorious picture of their past while denigrating that of their enemies. We see that in the growing racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism which is gripping the world.
Yes, antisemitism is back. It had never left. But for a while it was considered gauche to say the quiet parts out loud, as with racism. Those who did were shunned. But the old scourge of the West is back, and across the political spectrum. My former governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has something to say about that as well. I never voted for him. His tenure as governor wasn't disastrous, but it was stagnant. But Arnold shows that you can be a conservative and still have morals and honor.
History must be acknowledged. Hate must be confronted. Neither can be swept under the carpet to help the quarterly earnings. We will neither accept it, nor condone it.
This is your open thread.
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