Waiting for unity

Because of Covid-19, restaurants in danger of financial collapse move tables into the streets to make it possible to dine outdoors.

Over 74 million people think electing Trump for a second term is a good idea and 81 million think Biden is a better idea, but neither of those old white men has an antidote for greed and hatred. Biden talks of “building unity,” but he might as well set up tables in the rain.

Removing or jailing Trump will not solve anything everything. He is not only part of the problem. The problem is that 74 million people in this country think separating immigrant children from their parents is OK and building multi-billion-dollar walls to keep out immigrants and refugees is a good idea; hoarding billions and allowing the rich to evade taxes is smart and good for the economy; only wealthy people deserve education, health care, and housing; Covid-19 and the climate crisis are hoaxes; the existing caste system is a fine thing; and the police and the military should have more weapons and more innovative ways to harm and control people with more melanin in their skin. I cannot unify with people who support those values, but unless there was widespread election fraud in Trump's favor, they are nearly half the voting population of the USA. 

The FBI, the CIA, the Capitol Police, and everyone who was paying attention knew there was going to be a rush on the Capitol by armed right-wing extremists yesterday. It wasn’t a secret. But only a skeleton force of Capitol police was in place at the Capitol when the Trump loyalists arrived, and Capitol police stood aside as people with hate flags and hate symbols on their bodies and clothing stormed barricades, broke windows, threatened lawmakers, rifled offices, and looted. That was not an accident or a failure of tactics. That was a set-up.

What moved me most, of thousands of Twitter posts yesterday, was this statement by a Black physician named Tye Winters: “We're not asking for you to shoot them like you shoot us. We're asking you to NOT shoot us like you don't shoot them.”