In case you’ve lived under a tree or turned off social media this past weekend, I want to you to know Robert Mueller’s report landed. And after all the twists and turns of a Hollywood movie, here America stands – at the same spot where it all began. No conclusion on collusion.
To be fair, the Special Counsel’s report found evidence to support both sides of the question and left unresolved what the special counsel viewed as difficult issues of law. Attorney General Barr quoted Mueller as saying, “While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Back in January, Irate over the cost of a $6 street dog, a man brutally beat two women who tried to stop him from berating a Los Angeles street vendor, according to police. Los Angeles police released cellphone video. A man later turned himself in just hours after cellphone video footage of the incident splashed across local media stations. He claims other bystanders started the fight.
“Huh? I don’t understand the segue,” one might ask. “What’s the connection?”
“Direct link? Hmm. Not much,” Symbolically speaking, “Maybe more than we care to admit.”
Maybe all the Special Counsel’s did was emphasize where America is at. Maybe at the end of the day, all we’ve (meaning Americans) have done is elected a group of angry, pre-dementia patients whose thought process heavily leans toward bigotry. Maybe that’s what America is. Maybe that’s all we’ll become for the next 15 to 20 years.
What’s important to note is that we haven’t figured how to live with others whose beliefs don’t reflect our own. As a result, we resort to discrimination, violence or hate. Just as our legislators outsourced morality to the special prosecutor, so the did hot dog guy and bystanders. When you lack the courage to stand for justice, morality is not your job, it’s someone else’s.
Washington Post writer Greg Sargent wrote the following:
President Trump’s extraordinary response to the New Zealand massacre provides an occasion to intensify our scrutiny of a critical question: Are Trump’s words emboldening white-nationalist and white-supremacist activity at home and abroad? Trump regularly engages in both veiled incitement of violence and anti-Muslim bigotry with a kind of casual regularity that almost seems designed to lull us into desensitization. That this is losing the power to shock is bad enough. But that’s producing another terrible result: This desensitization leads us to spend too little time focused on the actual consequences these verbal degradations could be having.
For 675 days, Americans hung on Mueller’s every word and action: each hire, each redaction, each revealing footnote. Yet Mueller cannot answer that which is particularly reprehensible and hiding in plain sight: There are no signs Americans are particularly troubled by representatives utilizing politics to demean and debase others.
Every one us is responsible for Trump.
Yet, when confronted by America’s new reality, we watch. We pull out our cell phones and record. We post. WSeyell at the television. But we fail to vote. And for those who gave Mueller messianic stature, it’s time to reconcile the unreconcilable.
Image Trump’s presidency without a villain? Congratulations. That day is here.
What Mueller proved is that our own level of morality (or lack thereof) cannot be outsourced. Mueller never intended his report to neither clean our dishes nor neatly tie loose ends. At the end of the day, we have to look at ourselves. We must vet our own consciousness. Is Trump’s America the vision we want our children to live?
