Mayor Nutter, who is about as mild-mannered and cool a cat as you can find, referred to Donald Trump just recently as an asshole. He isn't wrong--in fact I admire his restraint in not referring to him with Charles Pierce's winning sobriquet of "ambulatory pilonidal cyst". (I think one of them kept Rush Limbaugh out of 'Nam. Thus, good for exactly nothing, ever.) My man for the PA Senate race, John Fetterman, called Trump a jagoff. Yup. This, too, sounds about right.
See, leadership is a funny old thing. You can lead bigoted asshats to support your mouthy hide by yapping it up, but at the end of the day, you are responsible for the permission slips you went and wrote to all the delinquent-ass SOB's who took the perfectly generic insinuations you made and then decided to hit up actual people and threaten them, personally. And if you do not understand or accept that responsibility--you are not any kind of real leader, because in the real world, words mean things and policies have consequences.
Philadelphia is proudly diverse and we are a great respecter of numerous faiths. My hometown is a welter of languages and restaurants and churches and ideas. Hate does not belong in the City of Brotherly Love. We are blighted but blessed. We are muraled and mosaicked and multicultural and multifaithed. We are musical and multifaceted.
And I blame these susurrations of specious sedition against our otherwise social comity coming from some self-serving casino king-pinhead, but let's not pretend other folks on the right haven't also encouraged distrust of our Islamic brothers and sisters.
This racist and bigoted crap isn't welcome in my city. This should not happen here. This should not happen anywhere. And Trump's gold-plated mouth needs to stop writing checks genuine white supremacists are gonna try to cash anywhere and everywhere.
2 comments:
Hi Vixen, I've cut back on my computer activities, and as you imagine I have a lot of responsibilities this time of year.
I'm afraid that current government policies will simply continue to engender more violence, more ill feelings.
Look, people are learning that there is a dark side to multiculturalism. And every time there is another attack on Americans the divisions and hostilities will continue to grow.
Enlightened leadership would not use government power to force people with contending views together.
People live where they want; government makes sure that laws are enforced--against vandalism, harassment and assault. That masjid that had a pig's head thrown at it was there for about 20 years. They didn't move in overnight into the midst of some homogenous group of non-Muslims. They were already part of the community.
I exaggerated Philadelphia's toleration a tad. In the 1840's, the Know-Nothings beat Irish immigrants and burned Catholic Churches. Perils of multiculturalism, you could say. But what else could they do? We were trying to live among actual white people.
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