Aletho News

I Have a Scream

By Brian Foley | CounterPunch | January 25, 2017

I get it. You don’t like Trump.

I’ve wanted to say that to Facebook Friends who’ve spent the past several months hate-posting against Trump. Most posts aren’t funny, creative, or informative. When not merely petulant, they’re raw unfiltered anger. People might as well post videos of themselves screaming.

Turns out someone sort of did. A viral video shows a woman at the Inauguration sitting cross-legged on the ground, with her hands in the air in front of her, emitting a loud, guttural, primal scream at the precise moment Trump was sworn in:

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

At least it was honest, right? Well, actually, it looks staged. The camera was on her, waiting. Nine seconds in, she looks up briefly, as if to make sure the camera crew was ready for “the scream.”
Afterward, the Screamer looked exhausted. The ITV news crew descended, and the Screamer was incoherent:

ITV: Can you explain your emotions to me? Explain your emotions to me.

SCREAMER: There’s just no way, there’s like just no — no way to even comprehend what this means, like. This very – for me, this very moment, is like, like within a cell. It’s like, the dark and the light are so tight right now at this moment. It’s, there’s so much potential, um, for beauty and for devastation, in this one moment it’s just almost incomprehensible that they can exist right now, so, so close!

ITV: How big – how seismic – a day is this for your country?

SCREAMER: I am so sorry to my world. I am so sorry to my world, this is not what we want. I love you people, I love people, and I. This is so alien, this is so false and broken, and…

Self-immolation would have been more articulate.

Even worse was a video many people posted with approval: a black-clad, masked protester silently attacking Richard Spencer, an alt-right leader. It looked like attempted murder, as the assailant came by quickly and hit Spencer in the side of the head with his elbow or forearm.

So much for the reverence paid earlier in the week for the nonviolence of Martin Luther King.

So much for Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high.”

Some Trump-haters have said that, since the election, they no longer “feel safe.” After all, their quiet neighbors, or the guy behind the counter at the DMV, or that little old lady at Rite Aid, MIGHT HAVE VOTED FOR TRUMP. Any one of them might be the racist sexist alt-right Nazi bastard who spray-painted the Swastika on that softball dugout…

It seems that, even more than these people hate Trump, they hate the people who voted for Trump – those racist sexist homophobic uneducated stupid evil people who are so stupid and racist and sexist and evil they voted for him, what a bunch of fools they’re just Putin’s useful idiots!!!!

“I don’t see how anyone could vote for Trump,” many liberals, especially those living in comfort, said before and after the election, with more smugness than curiosity. I mean, how could anyone who’s NOT racist xenophobic bigoted stupid sexist homophobic vote for Trump?

Trigger warning.

If you voted for Hillary Clinton, maybe I don’t feel safe around YOU.

Trump said bad, even deplorable, things about Muslims. But Clinton used her power as a Senator to enable Bush-Cheney’s unnecessary bombing of defenseless Muslims and others (including women and children) in Iraq. As Secretary of State, she was a key player in the unnecessary destruction of Libya, which also killed defenseless Muslims and others (including women and children). She has blood on her hands, not virtual Twitter blood, but REAL blood.

Trump may like offending people, but Clinton apparently likes killing them. Remember how she exulted in the gory, brutal murder of Gaddafi? That’s sicker than any Trump tweet. Clinton also supports the death penalty. She doesn’t much care for live people either. She voted for the USA PATRIOT ACT and its renewal in 2006. She opposed the right of gay people to marry each other all the way up until 2013.
What kind of sick, twisted, anti-human, anti-Muslim, racist, homophobic, LGBTQ-hating, vengeful, disdainful-of-constitutional rights people voted for her? If you voted for Hillary Clinton, you voted for all that.

Oh, wait. You didn’t vote for THAT? You’ve always supported LGBTQ rights? Opposed the death penalty as racist? Long thought the Iraq War was immoral? I see. You voted for Hillary Clinton not because you love her bigotry or her warmongering, but because you thought it would be progressive to have a woman in the White House! A DEMOCRAT!

I believe you. (And I’m not saying that just because I fear you might throw an elbow at my head.)

But look what you’ve done. You’ve given yourself space between your candidate’s positions and your own. Because, well, you’re a good person and you don’t agree with everything Clinton stands for. I get it. I’ve known you for years, and in all that time you’ve never blown up my house, tapped my phone, or sentenced me to death.

But why do you deny Trump voters that space, that distance you allow YOURSELF between your candidate’s positions and your own views? Some women and minorities voted for Trump. They can’t have supported all of his positions. Not every Trump voter is racist or sexist. Even if they were, though, all their candidate did was tweet and say racist and sexist things. Your candidate actually supported and helped perpetrate violence against Muslims. I didn’t see you wearing a safety pin back then.

Have you forgotten what (Democrat) political strategist James Carville said about elections? “It’s the economy, stupid!” Maybe, just maybe, many if not most people who voted for Trump voted for him…because of his economic platform. Trump may not help the economy, but his promise to do so was more conspicuous than Clinton’s.

If you stop and think, if you stop “othering” people who voted for Trump (yes, that’s what you’re doing), if you stop screaming, you might hear that many of these voters just want to earn a decent living, and that they’re keenly, painfully aware that the Democrat Party and its nominee ignored them – except to scold them as “deplorables.” That the Democrat Party decided it didn’t need to court them, as Chuck Schumer announced in July:

For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

There’s nothing wrong with wanting an economy that works for workers. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to provide for one’s family – one’s children. Maybe, like decent people who voted for Clinton, many Trump voters decided to overlook the worst aspects of their candidate.

If you want to engage in “resistance,” resist your own hatred. Your beloved Democrat Party won’t help you do that. Its leaders won’t admit they lost the election because of their party’s embrace of capital and abandonment of labor. Democrat leaders want you to keep hating and screaming at Trump to “delegitimize” him, to usher themselves (not you) back into power.

Anyway, don’t blame me. I voted for Jill Stein, because I’m anti-vaccine.

January 26, 2017 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Hillary Clinton, United States