re: #188 austin_blue

Well, after listening to that and reading that translation I’m going to walk outside and have a smoke…

OK, back now.

Here’s a question for the Lizards who will read the late night posts.

How can we call our country today a functional Democracy when there is so much hate driving our policy?

Where did we go so wrong?

I was in South Africa several years after majority rule began, and just after Mandela stepped down and Thabo Mbeki took over. Mbeki was a major step down from Madiba, much as Trump is from Obama, and the patience of the people for progress wore very thin pretty quick. But that’s a different issue.

I knew quite a bit about the apartheid days from following the news, and reading books like Biko, so the atmosphere post-apartheid was really quite a surprise. Mostly everyone was trying very hard to set aside the racial tensions and just get along. My school, and my kids’ schools, were mixed-race and AFAIK there was no problems on campus among whites, blacks and coloreds (that is, Asians and mixed-race people). There seemed to be more tension between English descendants and Afrikaners, to be honest, than between the other ethnic groups. It seemed everyone was following the lead of Mandela, who was the driving force behind the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which avoided harsh sentences for crimes done during apartheid but still held the perpetrators accountable.

It’s been 16 years since I’ve lived there, so I’m not sure how harmonious things are now. I know people were frustrated by the sluggish economy — especially folks in the rural areas — and the broken education system. Petty crimes, like thefts and burglaries, are still a problem, and there are still rare assaults and murders involving the Afrikaner white supremacists and blacks, but nowhere approaching the “white genocide” the alt-right talks about here in the States.

It takes leadership to provide the people a model for their behavior. Mandela was revered by almost everyone, and his forgiving nature inspired South Africans to end the hatred of the past. In the States, however, the national leader has fomented hatred and xenophobia, which has inspired a thankfully small portion of society to commit hate crimes on a variety of people. In response, we have seen Muslims helping fix Jewish cemeteries, Jews offering their synagogues to Muslims, and churches offering sanctuary to Mexicans. There is a lot of love and compassion among Americans, and Trump and his troglodytes will not win, anymore than the Afrikaner apartheid system won. But it will take constant, unrelenting resistance to fight back against him. Start locally and offer help to state and national groups as possible.

We will win.