100th-day speech most hate-filled in modern history
By Michael Gerson
May 1 at 7:39 PM
... Trump used his high office to pursue divisive grudges (Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer is a “bad leader”), to attack the media (composed of “incompetent, dishonest people”) and to savage congressional Democrats (“they don’t mind drugs pouring in”). Most of all, Trump used his bully pulpit quite literally, devoting about half his speech to the dehumanization of migrants and refugees as criminals, infiltrators and terrorists. Trump gained a kind of perverse energy from the rolling waves of hatred, culminating in the reading of racist song lyrics comparing his targets to vermin. It was a speech with all the logic, elevation and public purpose of a stink bomb ...
It is not sophisticated or worldly-wise to become inured to bigotry. The only thing more frightening than Trump’s speech .. is the apathetic response of those who should know better ...
“Genuine politics,” argues Havel, “is simply a matter of serving those around us; serving the community, and serving those who will come after us.” And this responsibility grows out of a moral and spiritual reality. “Genuine conscience and genuine responsibility are always, in the end, explicable only as an expression of the silent assumption that we are observed ‘from above,’ that everything is visible, nothing is forgotten.”
Any kind of serious social renewal begins, in Havel’s view, with each of us. “That is: in all circumstances try to be decent, just, tolerant and understanding, and at the same time try to resist corruption and deception.” But political leaders can and should carry this work forward. “I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence” ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-100th-day-speech-may-have-been-the-most-hate-filled-in-modern-history/2017/05/01/da4ad496-2e99-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html?utm_term=.e0697fb57af7
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