If this is the brave new America ...

By: Michael_T_Bucci

Shoot a Black man in the back in cold blood by a merciless Kenosha, Wisconsin cop named Rusten Sheskey and watch the city burn; watch the right-wing rise; watch President Trump and his ministers of propaganda exploit; exacerbate an already hardened “base” with incendiary and threatening tweets; give credence to armed militias.

Two bold markers need be placed on the dates of the Kenosha shootings: the one for Jacob Blake and the other for Kyle Rittenhouse. While I might claim it has been “open season” on Black men for years by killer-cops and right-wing White supremacists, that season has now been expanded to include protesters. Clearly, the message from 17-year old Kyle Rittenhouse to militias across the country—and to protestors—was delivered by his cynical act and, I predict, it won’t stop here, and hasn’t.

Should protests mount against armed militias joining with local and state law enforcement to violate human rights, injure and kill protesters, what a perfect formula is developing for Trump to exploit: Whip up the “base”; gaslight the populace; invoke “law and order”; unleash unrestrained law enforcement; declare “martial law”; suspend Constitutional rights; delay the election; institute an authoritarian fascistic state.

They have the tear gas, the rubber bullets, the AR- and MK-16s, Homeland Security, Tanks, Drones, Surveillance, armed White gangs hoisting American and Gadsden flags in 4x4’s and 600-vehicle caravans, Trump, prisons—and the Federal death penalty on their side.

When Bernard Goetz shot four African-American males as they approached him in a New York subway in 1984, the city saluted him. “There were people who praised the gunman,” wrote Jimmy Breslin in the New York Daily News. “As long as this was applauded, we in New York arrived at the sourest of all moments. When people become what they hate.”

“At Kent State two boys and two girls were shot to death by men unleashed by a president’s slovenly rhetoric,” wrote Pete Hamill that day in 1970 in the New York Post. “If that’s the brave new America, the hell with it.”

Reporting from Selma, Alabama in 1965 on the march from Selma to Montgomery, Breslin wrote: “There are people who have been beaten because they are black. They’ve had relatives and friends killed because they are black. They’ve been laughed at and spit at because they are black. And they have been held down in the dusts of the streets and made to be dirty and uneducated for all of their lives because they are black. Yesterday they stood up from the dust and asked for the right to vote, which is the start of the right to live.”

If today and tomorrow President Trump, law enforcement, right-wing militias and vigilante killers of Blacks and protesters; death threats to Democrats. Liberals, Progressives, women, gays and voters at the polls win the day; if that be the way to “Make America Great Again” through the cowardly force of violence and guns by people who have become what they hate, who defend burnt storefronts over human life, who extend the bloody history of racial violence to people “because they are black” ...

To hell with you, brave new America!

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(c) 2020 Michael T. Bucci

Michael T. Bucci is a retired public relations executive from New Jersey currently residing in New England. He was a Commentary/Opinion writer for a New England regional newspaper.

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