The presidential elections have steamed into our American landscape like the iron train did into the old west. Great for the white man, bad for the Indians. And this train is great for Trump and bad for Latinos or any American that believes in a multicultural and diverse America. Trump has an immigration (“deportation”) plan that has helped him surge in the polls. He is attacking the constitution and is unapologetic about his hate speech. Recently when his supporters beat a Latino American man with a steal pipe and urinated on his unconscious body, he merely shrugged it off and instead of speaking out against the violence, he was quoted as saying, “My supporters are passionate.”
His slogan of “Make America Great Again” is really a cover for “Make America White Again.”
Later Trump tweeted that he was against violence. That’s the abuser’s way – first the iron glove, then the soft one. He is playing a dangerous game and hoping to ride a wave of hate into the White House.
Trump’s immigration policy or deportation policy of some 11 million people living and working in America will destroy our economy and lives – Latino lives, but those lives don’t matter to Trump. America has been in a struggle against racism in this country and it is a struggle for the heart and soul of this very nation.
Yes, the Trump hate train, as I call it, is roaring down the track. The train has left the station and it’s fueled by nativism and hate and it’s steaming on with empty cattle cars attached and ready to be filled with more than 11 million undocumented immigrants, mostly Mexican that may be deported ironically from a land that was once theirs. Trump wants to build a perfect wall – a wall that is pure fantasy, much like the wall in Game of Thrones to keep out the white walkers. This wall is built to keep out Trump’s worse nightmare – the “brown walkers” even though a high percentage of undocumented immigrants come by plane and overstay their visas.
This huge wall will keep them from returning to America after we sort out the bad ones, then we will let them come back in, as he promises. As if he has given anyone a reason to believe him from his past flip-flops. The hypocrisy is ripe. Trump wants less government, less taxes and less Mexicans and to do that, he is willing to create more government and more taxes. And in the end, who will pay for three times more border enforcement, more border security and government that forcibly removes up to 11 million people including American children who are U.S. citizens?
The media is responsible for Trump. He is a reality show come to life and the reason he is leading in the Republican polls is the lack of positive Latino images and role models on television and film.
Trump is leading a “Make America White Again” campaign because his followers look at the “Leave it to Beaver” era when America was whiter, well at least on TV because that’s where this uniformed mob is getting their American history lessons from. And the media lens is out of focus and wrong. According to the USC Annenberg study on images of Latinos in the media, less than five percent of the roles on television and film are played by Latinos, far less than the real numbers and 38 percent the Latinas are either naked or partially clothed and most of these roles of Latinos are written by predominantly young, male, white writers. Bad data in, bad data out. Latinos are underrepresented and under dressed in the media and this is the world the Trump followers are nostalgic for. Trump’s portrayal of Latinos is a false and incorrect image, created from a white, in control and privileged perspective and that’s how they want America to remain.
It’s easy to pick on the undocumented immigrants here, or as I call them, “Future Americans”. They have no champions or billions to spend on a chance to buy the White House. They are too busy working and sweating in backbreaking jobs (that most white Americans won’t take) and paying taxes into our social security system that they can never collect. They have left an estimated 100 billion in uncollected taxes in our coffers according to a government study. Immigrant labor in California has harvested 50 percent of the fruits and vegetables for this country and when they are stopped from working, such as what happened in Georgia, an estimated 100 million in crops are left rotting in the fields.
Hate and prejudice is built on ignorance and fear and no one has helped create that more than the media and Donald Trump. Trump himself says he will keep families together, just outside of America. In an interview he said, “Do we have a country or not?”
Yes we do, Mr. Trump and it’s a country of laws and it’s a country big enough to create Americans like my family. My father fought in World War II and Vietnam. He volunteered to go to Vietnam to work as a civil servant to fix helicopters and planes “for the overtime” as he said. That’s a Mexican American work ethic. My uncle was killed in World War II in a Japanese POW camp. But Trump considers people captured by the enemy less heroic. Remember what he said about McCain? Trump avoided the draft himself. But hypocrisy and logic has never stopped him from spewing hate. What Trump is proposing is against conservative values that demand less government and less taxes. But hate is not logical. We need to return to the America my family has served and died for. We need to turn off this reality show come to life and derail his hate train.
