I feel violated. We should all feel violated.
Last edited Tue Jan 24, 2017, 12:51 PM - Edit history (1)
On the National Day of Patriotic Devotion, also known as the day in which Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States, also known as last Friday, I chose not to watch any of the festivities. I chose to look at the day without a respect of what was going on in Washington, focusing only on how the sun rose in the east and set in the west, just like any other day I've lived in my thirty-something years on God's green earth.
Instead, on that particular day, I took my kids to the local fair, where they rode rides and saw farm animals and played games. I did all I could to keep the specter of what was going on out of my mind. I was only briefly reminded of things while passing by a television in a fair booth keeping track of festivities. (The odd, jarring sight of the titushky anarchists setting a limousine on fire during the motorcade parade briefly had me thinking a major breaking story had just occurred, but a check on my phone confirmed nothing particularly abnormal had actually taken place.) But watching my kids riding the swing ride, holding their little stuffed animals they had won at the booth, smiling and laughing--it managed to take me out of the greater, darker shadow and into my own little peaceful moment, if only for a bit.
But reality came a'callin, and eventually I knew I had to slowly ease myself into the undeniably unfortunate situation where we all find ourselves. I watched some of the footage of the marches on Saturday, where my mother and my sisters had traveled to participate. I forced myself to view the Madman's self-serving and utterly bizarre "speech" before the CIA. Eventually, for posterity's sake I decided I needed to see the Inaugural Address that I had boycotted watching live and which my father and many here at DU had labeled extremely dark and disturbing. First, I just read the text, but last night I mustered up the fortitude to actually watch footage online as the Madman's stilted, insincere delivery can't be fully replicated by printed words alone. Understandably disgusted, I then immediately watched President Obama's 2009 inaugural address to cleanse my soiled palate.
And so, here we are now. This is not some work of alternate historical fiction. This is real.
So how do I feel? One word: Violated.
I feel we as a country have been violated from both within, as well as from beyond.
We saw the rise of a man without true accomplishment and completely devoid of morals and civility rise to the highest level of power in our land. We saw a man display truly contemptible behavior to the point of absurdity--mocking a reporter with a disability, defrauding thousands with a phony "university", bragging about his desire to assault women. He is the stuff that fictional villains are made of. We were told time after time after time to give him a chance, that he's capable of changing, that he will change, that the office will change him. We forget that this Madman has already lived 70 years on this earth without any desire to reform himself or act to the appropriate standards that most of us take for granted. We forget that not less than three years ago he was on Twitter bragging about his "fucked up" "haters and losers", and that he continued to use phrases like those after he was a candidate, after he was a major party nominee, after he was a President-elect, up to virtually the day he was inaugurated. I'm generally an optimist when it comes to people's human nature, but this is an extreme case. People like him don't get better after years of perfecting their anti-perfect image.
And yet this is what won the day for him back in November. (Albeit thanks in part to a constitutional technicality known as the electoral college, and I'll continue to take slight comfort in the de facto--but not de jure outcome of the popular vote.) Too many of us took the legitimate cynicisms and criticisms of longstanding institutions like politics and media and like fools threw their hands to a far, far worse monster. And now this creature has taken ahold of us and releasing its grasp will be no easy task.
But that's only half of the violation we have endured. Over the past decade, we watched overseas what happens when a person takes charge of a nation who has no tolerance for democracy, dissent or autonomy of other nations. We saw what happens with power without morality. Somehow we deluded ourselves into thinking the likes of Vladimir Putin was the problem of others and not of us. And yet three years ago I watched my family's homeland descend to chaos and uncertainty thanks to his subtle hand. We should have been alarmed that a man running for president had recently openly opined on Twitter that he desired Putin to be his "new best friend." But most of us shook that off as an amusing triviality and not as a threat to our national security. Yet here we are today, and the evidence continues to mountain that our collective national mindset in the events running up to the election was stealthily manipulated in a masterful Russian mindfreak, with the only beneficiaries in the end being the Madman and Vladimir Putin.
So yes, we were indeed violated, both from within and from outside. And we the people are victims, whether we recognize it or not. Perception of victimhood these days is a funny thing though. Too often it gets conflated with being weak, or even worse, being whiny and needlessly self-pitying. But there's no shame in to admitting you have been a victim of another's bad actions. In fact, recognizing and admitting to that fact properly transfers back the culpability to the person who should be held to account. So while we have been violated, we should not shrink from admitting that we were victims to a dasdardly deed. It does not make us weaker. Quite the opposite is true.
Every victim has a breaking point. That is a fact that both the Madman and Vladimir Putin will inevitably have to face.
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