There is no pending Trump Apocalypse & fascism is not just around the corner

It’s truly shocking that a man as vile as Trump could be elected president. That means the rightward shift initiated under Obama is certain to accelerate as it would under either Clinton or Trump. Our new president is a hateful jackass but there is no pending Trump Apocalypse & fascism is not just around the corner. Those who make that claim are just sore losers who take politicians at their word & believed Clinton would militarily go after Assad.

There’s no reason to go all misanthropic about the American people when only about a quarter of them voted & their two options were crap. It’s true some rightwing forces are emboldened by Trump’s election, but for that matter, protests today against Trump were several times the size of the KKK rally.

For perspective on the election take a look around the world: hundreds of thousands of people are being carpet bombed (Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq); people are brutally occupied by shooting armies targeting youth & children (Kashmir, Palestine); people are sustaining ethnic cleansing (Palestine) & genocide (Rohingya in Myanmar); millions of indigenous tribal people on every continent are being violently dispossessed by multinational corporations & forced to relocate to urban slums or other countries; tens of millions of refugees are drowning, refused asylum, living in filthy, overcrowded detention centers & being deported back to war zones.

The regrettable election is a far cry from living in a war zone, being disappeared, or drowning in the sea. Nobody wants things to get worse in the US, especially for the Black, Latino, & Indian communities or for undocumented immigrants; they have it hard enough already. Nobody wants Medicare & Social Security reduced, food stamps cut, Muslims persecuted, the Bill of Rights flouted. All of that would happen if we sat on our asses dreading the Apocalypse instead of organizing opposition but we have a long tradition of protest in this country–including today Black civil rights & Native American sovereignty rights.

Our new president is a hateful dangerous bonehead & not the only one on the planet. If we make like the young people of Kashmir & Palestine who don’t back down under fire, we can reverse the rightwing shift apparently being planned for us & hopefully learn again the imperative of international solidarity in opposing war, genocide, occupation.