Have We Let Our Guard Down?

Has anyone else noticed that there seem to be more incidents in the news lately involving racial and religious intolerance?  Almost every day we hear about graffiti on a mosque, immigrants being told to go back to their country, or someone being beaten because their skin didn't happen to be white.  Are these things new, or have they always been happening and we just haven't heard about them until now?  

I'm lucky enough to work in a diverse workforce and we have many people from other cultures in our building.  I decided to ask some of them what they thought about it.  Their answers made my skin crawl.

I spoke to an Indian woman in another department and she told me that since Trump won the election she was strongly considering moving her family back to India.  She said her children are now bullied at their school and her neighbors, who were previously welcoming and pleasant to the family, had become cold, distanced, and did not speak to them any more.  They are now treated as outsiders instead of welcomed as neighbors.  She and her husband are in the US on H1-B work visas.

I also spoke to an Iraqi who had moved his family to Omaha to escape the ravages of war in his country.  He told me that they have never really felt welcome, but they had felt "tolerated" until the last couple of months.  Recently they were dining at a popular restaurant in our Old Market district and a manager told them that they would need to finish up their dinner and leave because "American citizens are waiting for this table."  He told me that they are worried about their safety and that they have been trying to keep a low profile in the community.  They are all American citizens and they are Muslims.

The most perplexing conversation I had was with an African American computer engineer.  He was an American citizen, as were his parents and their parents.  I have no idea how his family came to be in America, but I suspect they came here against their will at some point.  He told me that since Donald Trump's inauguration he has felt a distinctly different vibe than he felt before.  He wouldn't go into specifics and during our conversation he even inferred that I was probing for information that I wouldn't have asked for before the election.  I was dumbfounded.

The next person I talked to is openly gay.  She said that, since the election, she and her partner have been treated differently.  They have been treated unfairly with their housing, insurance, and finances.  She said that she felt uneasy before, but now she and her partner fear for their safety every day.  They are afraid some nut case, emboldened by a Donald Trump presidency that legitimizes discrimination based on sexual identity, will physically harm them.  Holy shit.

So what's the deal with this stuff?  Why are people in the United States feeling uncomfortable and what are we (white Americans) doing to make them feel that way, if anything?  I think there's a certain "uneasiness" throughout America today.  Things are uncertain and we don't know what's coming next.  We really don't.  Eight years ago we felt another uneasiness, but it was tempered with hope.  This time the uneasiness is laced with  doubt and distrust.

Just look at the news.  When you think that Donald Trump has just done the most outrageous and illogical thing possible, all you have to do is wait until the next day and he tops it with something else.  Personally, I'm at a loss as to how we got here and even more so at how we're going to get out of this mess.  It just keeps getting more and more bizarre and no one really seems to care much about it.  We just go along with it.  Some of us just smile and say "It doesn't make sense" and then go along with it anyway.  I can't understand that at all.  Just a few years ago we wouldn't have allowed this to happen, but we let our guard down and here we are, right in the middle of it.

Maybe it's time for us all to just say to the world "We made a mistake" and then take whatever action is necessary to correct it.  Going along with something we all know is wrong isn't the answer.  You can decide for yourself, but I can't sit still and wait to see what everyone else does.  

I have to do something.  For now, my contribution is in my words because that's all I have to give.  I can't donate a bunch of money to activist causes, but I can donate my skills to them. And I will continue to do so until some of Trump's thugs put me in jail or we figure this thing out.