My Take on M.A.G.A.

I know that we get involved with what is going on and forget to step back and look at what led us to where we are.  I am trying to do just that regarding the seemingly impassible political divide in the United States. 

Right now, there the two sides are separated like no time in current memory and there seems there is no middle ground.  Admittedly, in the past divides like this have occurred and have led to not to just bad feelings but even violence and death.  The most obvious political divides that come to mind that have led to this level were the American Revolution and the Civil War.  One hopes that this current divide is not as strong but only time will tell,

Interestingly enough our advancement as a society may have led to this current problem.  Over the last half a century we as a society have strived to be a more equitably society.  I know, I know, we have a long ways to go and we have not been very successful in many ways.  However, only the most ignorant and selfish person would say we have not moved forward.  That forward movement is, in all likelihood, the reason for our current political divide.

Because of the changes, many people have felt disenfranchised.  That is generally not the case.  In point of fact, what they have “lost” was an artificial social structure, based upon race and gender, which gave these individuals place in society that they no longer enjoy.  They have chosen, with influence from the current administration, to equate this with some sort of “greatness” that America has lost.  Thus, “Make America Great Again”.  In reality, it seems that they want to harken back to the days where everyone knew their place in society and they were on top of it.

This is predominately a conservative attitude.  Conservatism is not about a particular political agenda.  It is more about maintaining the current norm, or in this case reverting to the norm or yesteryear, throwing the baby out with the bathwater if that is what it takes.  They just want it to be the way it was.  Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver.  They were fiction then, but they want it.  They want it with all of their heart.

The weirdest part about this is that, for some reason, this Conservatism has been embraced by a certain faction of the Baptist and Protestant movements, particularly those based in the southern part of the United States.  Ironically, they embrace it to the point that they disavow their Christian practices and believe system in order to foster and promote this ideology. 

The issues are multiple and I will try to address some of them.

It seems ludicrous to me that one of the issues is female equality.  It really does.  I grew up where women did not have equal chance at education and careers.  Heck, our country was unsuccessful in passing an Equal Rights Amendment.  Nevertheless, changes have been made, whether by laws or lawsuits, that have empowered women to be able to pursue education and job opportunities everywhere.  Obviously, it is an ongoing issue but all things are a progression.  The fact that most families in America need for the woman to work outside of the home for the household to have a good quality of life and to provide for the family unit does not seem to matter.  The M.A.G.A.t’s want to go back to the way things were up to the 1950’s or maybe early 1960’s where the main profession for a woman was supposed to be a housewife.  Really?  To compound the problem, Women’s Rights; All Women’s Rights, have been associated to reproductive rights.  Yes, birth control and abortion.  This gets the churches and moralists involved.  I am not going to discuss those issues here, as they need their own venue.  The only thing I am going to say is that, while that is a part of the issue, it is such a minor part of the issue of women’s equality and women’s rights that it is just a smokescreen to justify the objections to all women’s rights.  If it were not so serious, the stupidity of it would be funny.

Another big issue is gay rights.  Rights for LBGTQ is also an evolving issue.  And the conservatives want to stop it, stop it, stop it.  It just ain’t right.  It says so in the Bible.  It also says that women should not speak in Church, that it is a sin to eat shellfish, that it acceptable to have four wives, that it is acceptable to stone a daughter who is not a virgin.  Get the picture.  You can use the Bible to justify just about anything.  Bible passages were used in the antebellum South to justify slavery.  However, we have evolved.  We now know that homosexuality is not a choice as much as it is a natural issue; people are “born that way”.  Our country has changed the laws as to how they treat LBGTQ people.  Once again, we have a ways to go.  M.A.G.A.t’s want to go back to the way it was. Where it was when “those people” were outlawed and hiding and could be arrested for indecent, unnatural, and immoral practices.  I guess some people want this to go away but it will not.  If they had their way, it would just go underground again.  What a joke.  What a pity.

The main one as I see it is the change regarding racism.  We have made strides in trying to correct racism in this country over the last 50-60 years.  We have not solved the problem obviously.  The financial and social divides between races still shows that this is still a problem but progress has been made.  However, the M.A.G.A.t’s seem to focus on the negative aspect.  The focus on their objection to such things as Affirmative Action as being examples of how we have done wrong for the everyone else, as we have given preferential treatment for “them” when they neither earned it nor deserved it.  I agree that Affirmative Action is bad law but I also contend that I do not know of any better way to resolve the inherent issues we have created by our historical actions.  We cannot just wave a magic wand and make everything equal.  It just does not work that way.

Do not get me wrong.  Change is scary stuff.  And mistakes have been made and are still being made in our attempt to fix things.  Dwelling on those mistakes does not solve anything and does not address the need for change.  Stepping back solves nothing.  If anything it only makes matters worse.  Do we really want to be like China and crack down like they did after Tiananmen Square?  I am sure that M.A.G.A.t’s do but I do not.

As a final note, let us not forget the elephant in the room.  What really exacerbated the M.A.G.A. movement?  You could say that it was Donald Trump.  Actually, he is the beneficiary of the movement.  The genesis of the movement was the election and re-election of Barak Obama.  The racist, closet racist, conservatives, and opponents to change just could not stomach it.  Not only was he Black, he had a funny name, and his father was an African Muslim.  During his election they tried to paint him as a Muslim himself although he was a regular attendee of Church (and even if he was that was NOT a disqualification to be President).  The tried to claim he was not born in America, I thing primarily to keep hammering home that he was Black and had an African father; the irony is that in his first election his opponent, John McCain, was not born in America.  In short, the M.A.G.A. movement and the unwavering support of Donald Trump (despite the lies, illegal activing, and values unaligned with theirs) is based primarily on their hatred and fear of our Black President. 

That is what M.A.G.A. is really about.