What does it mean when I suggest that you vote for the ‘best candidate?’ This simply means do your work and learn about the candidates. After you have learned all that you can by going to websites such as “Real Clear Politics,” vote for the woman or man whose stance on the issues most closely mimics your own. For you, that is the ‘best candidate.’
If you are a regular reader, you know that I have proven my claim that the American voter is the least informed in the world. Like Donald Trump, most Americans learn their “facts” from television. If you doubt this, there are several ways to learn the truth.
One of these is to watch one of the late-night television shows when they send one of their team to go out onto the street and ask questions about issues and facts every American should know. Not one in ten can answer these queries accurately and truthfully.
Here are two facts I learned today; facts about the history of one of the most horrific crimes in the history of the world. Less than one-half of all adult Americans know that more than six-million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. When millennials were offered the word “Auschwitz,” they had no idea what it referred to. Very disappointing.
When we are young most of us do not immediately understand the importance of history. I admit that until I graduated from high school, I was unwilling to spend a great deal of time learning about the past. That all changed when I began learning about the history of my mother’s family. Then it spread to other events in the news which had their roots in our nation’s past.
What we learn or should learn from the past is critical to our future. From evolution to the atomic bomb there are lessons to be learned.
Today right-wing politicians in red states are attempting to end the teaching of events in America and in the world which reveal the darker side of mankind. In my opinion this is dangerous. Humans learn much more from their mistakes than from their successes. What should be a lifetime effort, becoming better and more productive people, can only be learned from past mistakes. Two of the major events in history are included in these censorship efforts; slavery and the Holocaust.
Slavery began long before our nation’s Declaration of Independence. The first known practice of slavery began in Mesopotamia in 6800 B.C.
When the wars ended, men captured in the battles were forced to become slaves for their captors.
In the “new world” slavery became legal in Massachusetts in 1641. Slavery was not abolished in America until 1865 when it became the 13th amendment to the Constitution. But racism in America has not ended. It continues to be the primary reason the United States has never been a great nation.
Although ‘public lynchings’ are no longer held in town squares, the anger and hatred directed at men, women, and children of color continues to be our national shame.
Adolf Hitler’s hatred of the Jewish people became the focal point of his rule over Germany. The largest of 40 concentration camps opened in southern Poland in Auschwitz in 1940. At least 1.1 million Jews were murdered in this single camp; more than six million at the end of the war between all of Hitler’s institutions of torture and death.
In 1945 Soviet military forces liberated the remaining prisoners in Auschwitz.
Today, Trump has began his own efforts to remove Hispanics from the United States. He ordered the creation of concentration camps on our southern border to prevent refugees seeking asylum from entering our country. Just yesterday he ordered his personal gestapo called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, to leave our border and travel to “sanctuary cities” across America to search for illegal residents regardless of their current status or their contributions to America.
Trump is not a Republican, a Democrat, or an Independent. He is first a capitalist, and secondly a regressive. He supports and is seeking the return of a new form of slavery and the end of Hispanic growth in America. To call Trump a racist is a pitiful understatement.
As I suggested earlier, I ask you to become an informed voter. If this had happened in 2016 our nation would not have the worst president, the worst man in the world, defiling the White House today. Only two types of people continue to support Trump today; men and women who choose ignorance and those who share his vile and disgusting views of America’s future.
“The Truth Lives Here”
Op-ed by James Turnage
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