As California fought off a new fire some weeks ago, creating what can be best described as a hellish landscape, and newly elected President Trump signed damning, damaging executive order after executive order, it’s hard not to think that the end of days is upon us. I was expecting a lot more leather boots on the ground, a soundtrack worthy of Ennio Morricone and actual resistance from the baying crowds, but I guess I’m going to have to make do.
I listened to the Right Rev. Mariann Budde’s speech during Trump’s inauguration, and I was filled with sadness. Is this what it’s come to? An episcopal bishop having to plead with the President of one of the most powerful countries in the world to have mercy on LGBTQ+ people and migrants? What has happened to so many of us that we are so devoid of empathy? How has education, emotional and otherwise, failed so badly? All those books and all that history, and still, we find ourselves in the midst of an Atwood novel. Fact has been put at the same level as unwashed, uninformed opinion. I would say it beggars belief, but it feels like I’m watching a car crash in slow motion.
Of course, I am aware that America is not my country, “not my problem”, and that people on social media and the news can sometimes distort and twist things, but the executive orders and the dismissals being made speak louder than any media-smearing campaign can. When America pulls out of the World Health Organisation and signs an order to withdraw the country from the Paris Climate Agreement, it affects all of us. This isn’t a tiny island in the Med we’re talking about; it’s literally more than twice Europe’s size.
I don’t want to sound like the harbinger of doom, but if the next four years are going to look like these first few days, then we’re going to need to buckle up and work harder for this not to spread to our shores. We must demand for the rights we have to be enshrined and continue to work tirelessly against bigotry and those who seek to rule through oppression.
Francis Scott Key called America the land of the free. More than 200 years later, I feel compelled to ask: Free for who?