Takin' it to the streets

 

It seems that Trump appointee and head of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, has finally decided that Joe Biden is the “apparent” winner of the election and will allow moneys for a transition of some sort. Her letter to Biden authorizing the release of funds to begin the transition phase was typical of a Trump appointee: self-serving, full of petty complaints, and denials that she was pressured by the Trump administration to withhold transition funding. It is not “coincidental” that Trump tweeted on the same day that he had “recommended” that Murphy begin “initial protocols,” so we know that at the very least Murphy was lying about not feeling any “pressure” from Trump, and only acted when he “authorized” her to do so.

Murphy claimed that she had received threats against her, her family and even her pets. Whether or not she actually did, or just interpreted media criticism as such, it was par for the course for those aligned with Trump to complain that they are under siege by radical leftists and BLM activists. Fox News and other right-wing outlets continue to frighten people with its regurgitation of scenes of protesters, interspersed with statistics on the surge in violent crime, especially in New York City. It is certainly true that things have not quieted down much in Portland, where we see the BLM movement being hijacked by white anarchists, for whom it didn’t matter who won the election:

What will “satisfy” these people and persuade them to go home is uncertain; local officials and police don’t know how to “engage” them because their “demands” are nearly impossible to meet. What is the most likely scenario is that when lockdown orders end and things return to “normal,” these people will decide to go back to their “day” jobs. Crime rates in large cities will also likely return to “normal” for the same reason; while the national unemployment rate is currently at 6.9 percent, in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, the unemployment rate remains in double digits.

But there should be no mistake: Donald Trump is not the “cure” for the ills the country faces; if anything, his obvious lack of empathy for others, and his existence in a privileged bubble has made him most unfit to understand the problems of ordinary people, and it is a trait he has passed on to his own children. In a Vanity Fair piece, Ivanka Trump’s former “best friend” Lysandra Ohrstrom revealed one episode where she suggested Ivanka read Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls, about the goings-on in a working-class town in Maine. Ivanka allegedly responded “Ly, why would you tell me to read a book about fucking poor people? What part of you thinks I would be interested in this?”

Yet some “poor” people seem to be very interested in Trump, why who knows. Well, we actually do know--it’s because like Trump most of them live in a bubble world without empathy for the problems of “others.” A man in Virginia was recently arrested for misdemeanor assault because he ignored two women who told him to stay away from them because he wasn’t wearing a face mask; instead he approached them and “blew” at them in an “exaggerated” manner. The man was wearing “a Trump shirt and an inflatable pool tube with Trump’s likeness on it around his waist,” according a local news report.

Of course, actions like this are not exactly mass shootings by the odd deranged Trump supporter, or commandeering a stolen bulldozer and rampaging through a town destroying Biden campaign signs. People can reveal their desire for destructive behavior in more “subtle” ways. According to Newsweek in regard to the ongoing recount in Wisconsin,

Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson said in a report by the Associated Press on Saturday that in some cases, the (Trump) observers were objecting to almost every ballot pulled for the count. Christenson continued to note that the complaints were putting the recount behind schedule, and multiple observers were breaking rules by interrupting vote counters with questions and objections. He called the behavior "unacceptable." "It's not our job to train their observers on what they're observing," Christenson said during a media briefing on Saturday, as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "They clearly don't know what they're doing and so they keep asking questions.

There are many different methods to be destructive and behave in an uncivilized manner. Not all of them involve actual physical violence, although perhaps it can be said that it is a metaphorical kind of violence to deprive hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people to be heard through their vote. The fact is that much of the violent activities of some protesters we see on the streets is a direct response against the desires of the type of people who would support someone like Trump to disenfranchise and deny voice to millions of mostly minority voters. These Trump supporters seek to invalidate the voice of the “others” so that only their own will be heard, and through them, Trump’s. When historically oppressed and discriminated-against groups feel that their voice is being muzzled--well, we’ll let the Doobie Brothers song tells us what happens:

You don't know me but I'm your brother
I was raised here in this living Hell
You don't know my kind in your world
Fairly soon, the time will tell

You, telling me the things you're gonna do for me
I ain't blind and I don't like what I think I see

Takin' it to the streets
Takin' it to the streets
Takin' it to the streets