We Didn't Stop It

We didn't stop it.

I guess we thought it wouldn't go that far.  As Anne Frank said, " in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

And maybe they are.  But you can't prove it by what we have let happen.

It's true.  We band together when a storm ravages our community.  But we don't seem to react when the temperatures accelerate around the world, and the sea levels rise, and species die off, and agriculture becomes more difficult.  That we ignore.  Because that requires forward-thinking, that requires change, uncomfortable and awkward change.

It's true.  Some of us gave food and clothing to the poor.  But we did nothing to change an economic system that increased our wealth gap and allowed the few to enrich themselves at the expense of the many.  We did nothing to challenge the system that created the poverty in the first place.  Instead, many of us blamed the poor for being poor.

It's true.  Some of us generously gave to those whose family's had to set out Go Fund Me accounts and fundraisers and canisters in convenience stores to provide families with a desperately sick family member some of the means to survive and pay a few of their medical bills.  But we did nothing to provide healthcare as a basic human right, leaving it to a system where private insurers made money by collecting excessive premiums and then denying care wherever they could get away with it, where drug companies without conscience charged exorbitant prices for life-saving drugs at rates far above that of other countries, where hospitals and medical providers accept indigent people in emergency care and then make up the costs by charging everyone else more.

It's true.  Some of us have friends in minority communities and family members whom we love in the LGBTQ community.  But that did not translate enough to stop us from "fear of the other." As long as they didn't come for us, everything was cool.  Too many of us felt our problems stemmed from others receiving too much government help, somehow getting a leg up on the more deserving group that they were from.  Somehow, those who cared for their own community were fearful of other communities, other people.  For some, the preservation of a nostalgic and imaginary white culture became more important than love, tolerance, diversity, and understanding.

They took refugees coming across the border, and instead of due process, they separated families, caged people, kept them in inhumane and insufferable conditions, wasting time arguing about whether they were concentrations camps when every day they became more and more like them.

And we did nothing to stop it.

Our racist President told Congresspeople of color that should go home to where they came from, called them traitors and unamerican, all because they dare to oppose him.  He calls their districts rat-infested hellholes.  His rhetoric is dangerous and incendiary.  It leads to more and more violence, fueled by the availability of weaponry able to kill many in mere seconds.

And we did nothing to stop it.

They snatch people from their workplace while their children are in school, forcing families apart, punishing people doing jobs that Americans reject, and doing them for substandard wages, and being exploited by their employers, and their employers, the real criminals, skate free.

And we did nothing to stop it.

We have the most impeachment worthy President in American History, and yet the Democratic leadership slow walks it, and polling does not indicate that the American people are fired up enough to care.

And we did nothing to support it (at least not enough of us).

We are almost at the point of no return.  We may have already passed it on global warming.  Our democracy hangs by a thread.  Our identity as a good and decent people is shrinking to nil.  Open fascism stares us in the face, and we just blink and turn away.

We did not stop it.

I pray these are not the words we have to say to our children and grandchildren.

But we may already be too late.