By David Brooks on May 27, 2022
photo: Bill Hackwell
The crushing avalanche of shocking news in the U.S. this week (like too many before it) leaves one at a loss for adjectives – and verbs, and well, words then – and in search of refuge. Racist hatred, the assault on civil and human rights, and a fear cultivated by right-wing forces draws blood across the country.
An 18-year-old white man travels hundreds of miles, loads his semi-automatic rifle, turns on a camera to broadcast live on the Internet as he kills 10 people in a supermarket in an African-American neighborhood in Buffalo.
He apparently acted on the white replacement conspiracy theory promoted by right-wingers (including Trump and his allies), according to which American whites are being replaced by other races through immigration in a conspiracy coordinated by Jews for electoral purposes.
One-third of Americans believe in that conspiracy, according to an AP/NORC poll. This time it was against African Americans, in other similar ones it was against Latinos and Mexicans, as in El Paso in 2019, and that list is long.
By the way, mass shootings, with all kinds of motivations, do not cease in this country: in the 19 weeks since 2022 there have been 198, sorry, 199 (as I was writing this one more was reported). The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported last week that an unprecedented number of Americans, more than 45,000, were killed by firearms in 2020. Bullets are now the leading cause of death among children and young people in this country.
In another area, the same CDC reports that nearly 108,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2021, breaking another record.
Also in these days it was recorded that the pandemic in the United States exceeded one million deaths, most of them unnecessary, caused by the dismantling of the public health infrastructure by neoliberal policies, along with a massive right-wing campaign against the use of mouth covers and later against vaccines, while Trump and others denounced that everything was the fault of the Chinese, thus unleashing a wave of hate crimes against Asian-Americans and immigrants that continues today.
At the same time, in the war on women’s fundamental rights, if the Supreme Court’s overturn of the constitutional guarantee of abortion achieved half a century ago proceeds, as expected, access to abortion in more than half the states could be banned in the coming months while politicians in Louisiana are contemplating declaring abortion to be murder; the governor of Nebraska stated that victims of rape or incest should be forced to remain pregnant until they give birth.
How is it possible to put up with this “normalcy’? One refuge (to avoid drugs or exile as options) is in the expressions of solidarity, beauty and nobility that manifest across, under, and on the sides of this country on a daily basis.
The thousands who marched in over 350 events across the country this weekend in defense of women’s rights, the almost daily news that workers at yet another Starbucks have unionized (from zero in December, employees at over 60 stores have voted to unionize with another 175 requesting a formal vote), part of a phenomenon that could be warning of a renaissance of the labor movement; the young people with urgent anger who without asking permission are leading environmental, anti-gun, anti-war and pro-future movements; the immigrants who are transforming this nation with struggle and culture (not replacing whites, but fighting alongside them to rescue the country for all), not to mention musicians, actors, dancers, screenwriters and the ever-vital clowns/comedians.
They are not just refuge from the avalanche. Rather, they are antidote, response, resistance, rebellion. In the face of the unbearable normality that dominates the news from the United States.
Source: Cubadebate, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano – English