Like it or not (mostly not), inauguration day is coming soon. Pretty soon the Cheeto with a nest made out straw that he calls hair will be sworn in. It is a day that many of us find ourselves fearing with terrifying legitimate reasoning given some of the President-elect’s stated policies. In attempt to comfort others, many people have stated that we would be okay since, “We survived the Bush administration.” They are right: we did survive the Bush administration, but I can’t help but feel like there are large differences between both of those cases. And while I do appreciate their attempts to remain positive, trying to lull ourselves into a false sense of confidence is not the way to go about it.
Once again, yes, we did survive the Bush administration, but the big difference between both of these administrations was the social impact it had on our everyday lives as Americans in this country. Granted, I was relatively young for most of the Bush administration and I was a bit more concerned about getting my homework done for class the next day than I was about the social impacts of the new president. In some ways, as a college student, I think I’m still more concerned about getting my homework done on time, but we’re not going to get into the U.S. educational system right now. I’m not going to say that Trump is directly responsible for the various attacks and hate crimes on minority groups; he even publicly came out and told violent individuals to stop the attacks. Since then, we have seen a decrease in publicly recorded events of that nature, but I can’t help but wonder if that will change after inauguration day. Will we see another spike in events of that nature?
I was having a discussion with a friend about the uncertainties given the upcoming year and by extension, the next 4 years. As you can probably guess, he stated that famous saying, “We survived the Bush administration.” He was not the first one to say this to me, it’s just one of the more pertinent examples. When I replied with the fact that many of his followers felt justified in their actions, and that is what eventually led to the spike in hate crime related incidents; he replied with “Yeah, but that’s not Trump doing that.” He wasn’t wrong, Trump wasn’t the one going around Philadelphia and spray painting swastikas on buildings, nor was he the one trying to rip off a woman’s hijab, but what he did do was make it socially acceptable for those incidents to occur. I’m not going to say hate crimes didn’t exist during the Bush era. Of course they did, but something just seems different about them this time. Maybe it’s the fact that people can now wear their hate like sash they got from one of trump Beauty pageants, I don’t really know for sure. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, but that’s the scariest part of all, isn’t it?
