by Roberto Reveles
Following our country’s latest mass shootings, more of our consoling vocabulary is losing the essence of what once brought comfort to those who are left to grieve.
The once-comforting words – thoughts and prayers – have lost their meaning.
Sadly, even public expressions of prayer on the heels of continuing violence, seemingly waft away in fleeting emptiness.
The reality of the human voice itself is being dissipated by shallowness of a perpetrator who preaches hate, then sidesteps responsibility for the violence his words provoke. It’s a mental illness, we’re told. Indeed.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Words reeking with racism and bigotry.
In heated response, one is tempted to use the same distorted, hurtful logic in observing that when the Republican Party selects its candidates, they’re not choosing their best . . . instead they enable racists and bigots.
This kind of senseless and biting rhetoric clearly should have no place in America and in Pinal County.
But it does.
This week that same perpetrator shamelessly and mechanically intoned from his printed script
“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.”
Empty words dripping with hypocrisy in the new Trumpian speak.
Nonetheless our public numbingly waits for the condemnation that will not be forthcoming.
Our nation’s values, our nation’s governing institutions, our national security, and now even our common sense of decency trampled once again by Trump.
Meanwhile some of us presumably good people will get chided for calling it what it is, in Trump’s own hollow words – racism, bigotry and yes, white supremacy.
How true and how sad.
Roberto Reveles is a civil rights activist, former long-time congressional aide, past president of ACLU-Arizona, founding President of Somos America, and a URFC spokesperson and co-founder.
