We are all Americans

After yesterday’s attempted assassination attempt, I just keep thinking the same thing: We are all Americans.

We’ve forgotten this during the past 8 years. We have demonized the “other side” to the point of justifying violence. Actual violence, not words are violence nonsense.

Here’s just a smattering of the headlines about Trump, that have become all too common for nearly a decade.

Look, I wasn’t happy the night he was elected in November 2016. I can freely admit that. But, I mostly felt he was a bit too cartoonish and un-leader-like to be our President.

And then, later, when I’d long gotten over my stint of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I wasn’t happy with Trump’s response to covid. He gave Fauci, and Birx to a lesser extent, the microphone. For far too long. And while Fauci didn’t literally shut down schools and churches and small businesses and AA meetings, prevent us from comforting dying loved ones in the hospital, bar us from gathering in our homes to celebrate holidays and in the streets to protest, ban us from sending our children to school . . . he most certainly set the tone for government doing so. It was Trump who gave Fauci the authority and the space to preen and fear monger and stand there as the embodiment of “the science”, terrifying the world and justifying hatred and vitriol spewed at anyone who dared challenge him.

Trump led “operation warp speed” — which he still defends despite the obvious evidence that this “life saving” vaccine is, at the very least, not very effective.

These are legitimate criticisms, I think.

I do not, nor have I ever, believed he is Hitler. Or anything remotely close.

And, now, I am astonished by his resilience. The man has grit, that is undeniable.

During 2020 and beyond, as the covid response went on — and on — I wasn’t happy with the fact that Americans turned against each other in ways I’d never imagined were possible in this country. I was heartbroken that my challenging the covid response as illiberal and harmful — not only to people but our democracy — resulted in me and my family being vilified and targeted. My fellow citizens in the city I had loved for more than 30 years — San Francisco — came for us. They called the police on us at the park. A woman screamed at me at the beach, yelling in my face, with my 3-year-old daughter by my side: “I won’t feel sad for you when your children die!” She felt good about herself doing so. She felt justified wishing death upon my child.

Keyboard warriors posted a picture of my house with my address on social media. I was chased from my city, my community and ousted by my friend group of decades.

That is my personal experience of the division and dishonest, inflammatory rhetoric that is so common right now that we almost don’t notice it anymore. In ourselves, or others. I am guilty of this, I know.

Now, I get voicemails like this:

Many of them. In quick succession. From a deranged person who feels justified in leaving hateful messages, because he thinks I’m a genocidal murderer for thinking women and men are different and that women deserve privacy and safety. Ironic, right?

All of this said, the media machine, has, for the last 8+ years demonized Trump — and anyone who agrees with him on anything — as evil incarnate, on par with Hitler, despite the fact that the man has not mass-imprisoned and mass murdered any segment of the population, nor indicated any intention to do so.

If he was going to do it, wouldn’t he have started that process in his 4 years as President? Wouldn’t he have been overt about it at some point?

It’s so stupid and ludicrous on its face. But it is intentional. It justifies all manner of law fare. And violence — as we saw yesterday when a 20-year-old man attempted an assassination of the presumptive Republican nominee.

The entire tenor of the national conversation changed when Trump became President, and not for the better. And it wasn’t just “the people.” It was the media machinery leading the charge, giving legitimacy to “the people” who would vilify 50% of the country.

We no longer had political disagreements on policy. The other side — the Republicans, or more specifically, the subset of “MAGA Republicans” — were evil, according to the most venerated mainstream media sources.

The MAGA crowd are evil, still. Evil enough to be called that thing that is the embodiment of evil — Hitler! Nazis! (Even though, weirdly, there are elements of the far left and far right now who either deny that the Holocaust ever happened or, in a real twist, praise Hitler and say “He should have finished the job!”)

When the entire media machinery descends into this extreme vilification, it does in fact justify all manner of violence. I mean, Hitler should have been assassinated, right? (Except according to the lady in that video above.)

As Tulsi Gabbard said, correctly, yesterday:

The assassination attempt on President Trump is a logical consequence of repeatedly comparing him to Adolf Hitler. After all, if Trump truly was another Hitler, wouldn’t it be their moral duty to assassinate him?

And now, here we are. If there were ever a time to understand that words are not violence, but that violence is violence, it is now.

If there were ever a time to remember that we are all Americans, aspiring to the ideals of this country — freedom, representative democracy, inclusion, progress, equality — it is now. Even if we have failed at times — and we have (as have I) — to live up to these ideals, we hold them in our sights, and continue to improve and strive to embody them.

We do not imprison political opponents. We do not murder those we disagree with.

We do not take their jobs and send them to jail on trumped up charges. We don’t oust them from polite society for disagreeing with policy or the news driven narrative of the day.

We don’t do those things. We are Americans.

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When I was a young gymnast competing for Team USA, I always swelled with pride to hear the national anthem played upon entering the arena. I never considered not putting my hand over my heart and singing the national anthem, atop the podium.

Whether I won or lost, whether Team USA won or lost, competing against the Russians or Canadians or Italians or French or all of them at the same time, I was grateful to compete for THIS country.

And when I grew up, I continued to fight for those American ideals, in the best way that I know how.

I’m reminded today, to take the rhetoric down. To tamp down anger and rage and replace it with perseverance. And empathy.

I’m guilty of falling short, as recently as yesterday. But I am redoubling my efforts not to. Which doesn’t mean I will back down in my beliefs. Or my own personal efforts to return us to some semblance of truth and freedom. I live in material reality. I know that men and women are different. I know what political violence is. And it is never acceptable.

We are all Americans. We’d do well to remember that right now.