Trump’s America vs. California
Walking around my small California beach town, it’s become harder and harder to not have a sense of a storm approaching, or a dimming of light, despite the beauty of my surroundings. Nothing has physically changed since the election; there’s been no great upheaval as of yet. But there’s something in the air that’s wrong. There’s a sense that life, as we know it, is somehow slipping through our fingers.
California is no utopia by any stretch of the imagination. We have real concerns, real problems. None of us who love this state can say it is without fault. But in the last few years, the State of California has continually made the right moves to overcome the great recession, expanding to the point that we are the sixth largest economy in the entire world. We have put our own house in order so that we can deliver a better future for all races, all creeds, all genders, and all orientations. With the legalization of cannabis we have successfully disengaged from a major part of the failed “War on Drugs” that continues to irrationally waste resources.
But all that progress is threatened once the ridiculous “God-Emperor” of the Alt-Right moves into office.
We’ve seen the awful video of his neo-Nazi supporters triumphantly shouting slogans that should have been buried in the ruins of 1945 Berlin. We’ve seen the appointments to high office of deplorable men and women; a collection of race baiters, conspiracy theorists, homophobes, climate change deniers, and Wall Street insiders. We’ve seen the new Generals in this war against our way of life.
In my town, I see interracial couples living in harmony with their neighbors. I see Asian, black, Hispanic, gay and transgender individuals going about their business without a second glance. I know person after person who is making a go at the American Dream, here in California, with zero regard to their race or religion.
But Trump’s America, the one Californians overwhelmingly voted against, hates what I see in my town, and will stop at nothing to ruin it. Trump’s America wants to roll back the clock by several decades. It wants to see the gay and lesbian couples openly holding hands together be crushed with social pressure and shoved into conversion therapy. It wants to see the good old days where being rich and successful was a “White Male’s Only” privilege.
Trump’s America wants to see our policemen and women waste their time and waste our tax dollars persecuting members of our society due to the fact that they smoked a plant in their backyard. It wants to ignore climate change, and pretend that rising sea levels and uncomfortably hot Octobers are just a magic trick invented by the Chinese politburo. It wants to put into law the wholesale looting of our tax dollars, so every cent can be spent propping up the 1%. It wants California to bend a knee to a destructive kleptocracy run by a vapid political machine in Washington, D.C., one full of near permanent members of Congress who have the ethics and decency of underfed rats.
Trump’s America wants our way of life to end. The choice is very clear for us: either we join Trump’s America, or we keep the true American dream alive here in California. There is no middle ground.
