I walk through the streets, trying to get a little bit of exercise during the pre-dawn hours, before the madness of my workday kicks in. As I walk by the darkened buildings, apartments, condos, and houses, once in a while the reflection of a large television will catch my eye. As I maintain my pace of 3.5 MPH, I’ll catch a glimpse of a large television screen with various news stations shouting into the room. This morning my brain moved fast enough to catch snippets of 24 hour news station crawls: “Salvadorians denied…”, “Immigrants removed from…”, “Chaos in the White House…”. Someday I’d like to see something happy like, “Democrats and Republicans agree to work together on hunger and homeless crises”, but we know that will never happen.
Since Trump took office we have swung into this societal trend of having no empathy. I find this era of indifference to be overwhelming. The inexplicable public support of “I’ve got mine, I don’t care that you don’t have yours” just boggles my mind. I try to step into the world of ignorance, where my only concerns are those of my own, but I can’t help but think doing so would be socially irresponsible and negligent.
I was hoping the border wall had been forgotten. I still read and hear chants of “Lock her up”, even though the only reason Hillary Clinton is relevant in politics today is because those against her won’t let her have her life in peace. There is a crazy amount of vengeance permeating the populace today. People have turned real life into a poorly scripted reality show. Quite frankly, anyone that thinks the United States is in a good place right now is either incredibly stupid or willfully ignorant.
The issue is the noise is overpowering but the only way to fix things is to make more noise. But I’m tired. 2018 has felt exhausting and it’s only the 9th of January.
