I keep seeing one phrase come up over and over again: “we’re better than this.” I understand what people mean by it, or want to anyway. We’re not a country that hates. We’re not a country that keeps people out. We’re not a country that relies on ignorance or stupidity or racism or general shallow foolishness. Here’s the problem: that statement, “we’re better than this,” is aspirational. It’s not descriptive.
Think about what’s in living memory for us. Jim Crow. Dogs and firehoses. A world where a grown woman needed a husband to open a credit card for her. A world where it’s okay to fire someone because of marital status – and not just what gender you marry, the fact that you got married at all. George W. Bush re-elected despite a polled majority opposing him. Trayvon dies and Zimmerman walks. California – California – elects Arnold Schwarzenegger twice and then votes to outlaw gay marriage. The kinds of people who blew up my mother’s high school are still alive, and they all voted for Trump.
The fact is, if you look at the reality of America in 2017, we’re not better than this. We’re just not. If we were, we wouldn’t be in this spot to begin with. But there were enough people willing to absorb lies and misinformation and deception and just let them slide, and enough people to buy it without question, and now matters are worse. A majority of the public disapproves of the accident in the White House, but not enough to hold their nose and vote for the one person capable of preventing it. There was an obvious solution, but enough people were indifferent or were too good to vote for “the lesser of two evils” or too consumed with “I got mine, fuck you” to do what it would take to prevent this.
Tommy Lee Jones, in Men In Black, nailed it. Nailed it. “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” And for fifteen years – going on twenty – we validated dumb and panicky. The average person on the street didn’t stand up to the fear mongering. They didn’t stand up to the lies. They didn’t stand up for majority rule when it was threatened. They didn’t stand up for the truth. They didn’t reject prevarication and bullshit and made-up internet garbage. And instead of rejecting birtherism, they elected the Head Birther In Charge to replace Obama.
We’re not better than that. We aren’t. Stop pretending we are. All we can do is try to come up with a way to survive despite. And maybe in a couple generations, we can hope that we’ve bent the curve enough to be better than this.
But probably not.