It has become all too easy for us to demonize one another, to label others as cruel, evil, destructive people, different from ourselves, virtual monsters to be feared and destroyed. But aren’t the real demons those who are the accusers?
This ongoing demonization within our society should be antithetical to all of us, but so many of us seem to revel in it and find it entertaining, not realizing the harm that it does. Bigotry and intolerance grows among us like a cancer, fed by the fearful and the ignorant and the uncaring, the smug and the self-righteous and the selfish.
There has always been a dark undercurrent within our American society, this willingness to identify and marginalize by race or religion or ethnicity, but now it has transformed itself into a mainstream bigotry based upon political affiliation.
Through the power of repetitive lies and accusations, many of us now believe that the Democratic Party is anti-American, anti-traditional values, anti-police, anti-military, anti-freedom, anti-heartland, anti-sovereignty, anti-capitalism, and therefore evil – to be feared and hated, and ultimately destroyed. So too, many of us now believe that our established newspapers and cable/network news organizations purposefully lie to us every day and cannot be trusted.
This is bigoted, hateful speech and should be reviled by all of us. Those people who first coined and then promoted the renaming of one of our major political parties into the Demoncrats should be congratulated for their cleverness, and then publicly and loudly exposed for the cynical, manipulative, self-serving and unpatriotic individuals that they are. Their efforts to foster distrust of our independent free press is another example of bigoted and hateful speech, and the degree to which they have been successful in demonizing the mainstream media should be alarming and frightening.
We should all appreciate the checks and balances that having two healthy political parties provide just as much as we should appreciate the checks and balances that having three separate and independent branches of government provide. We should also appreciate that having a free press that is allowed to investigate and report on the actions of our government is necessary for us to continue to be a free people.
We should all stop for a moment and realize that a totalitarian state has a single party, with a ruling body, a judiciary, and a propaganda system that exist to control thought and behavior and eliminate dissent, typically in support of a single leader and close associates. Is this really what we want our country and society to devolve to?
Those Americans who have decided to hate the Democrats and the mainstream media need to re-evaluate their decision. There is little that could be more fundamentally in opposition to the principles of our democracy and the vision of our founding fathers than this demonizing of our fellow citizens and our established institutions.
This is a very unsettled time, with great anxiety throughout the world and within our own country as we address the effects of climate change, the increase in threats to peace, economic inequality between rich and poor, employment uncertainty brought about by robotics and automation, widespread mental health issues, and many other very significant concerns.
This is not the time to let ourselves continue to be led astray by the voices of those politicians and media talking heads that see profit in hate speech and the demonizing of the foundations of our country. Free thought, and open and honest discussion must be appreciated and protected by us all.