Restore Decency

To this day, I can’t understand why anyone voted for a presidential candidate who mocked a disabled journalist in front of a television audience. Maybe they weren’t watching when it happened. Maybe they were OK with making fun of disabled people. For whatever reason, he got away with that, so no one bats an eye when, in his second term, he says to another journalist who asked questions he didn’t want to answer, “Shut up, piggy!”

That second term thing is pretty hard to understand, too.

Politics has always been a pretty rough business, but there have been politicians who brought grace to the world stage, and not just members of my party. Now, we have Olympic performers with mixed feelings about representing the United States. And how does the president respond? In his usual way, by calling them names.

It takes a certain type of person to be the chief executive of a country. Hard decisions are demanded of them. Imagine sending men and women to fight the country’s battles, knowing that some of them will not return to their families.

Remember when the president said of John McCain, “I prefer people who didn’t get captured,” again in front of a television audience. Imagine any other president dissing a bonified war hero.

When two U.S. citizens were killed by ICE in January, the president, and those who speak for him, made up their own version of what happened. Did any of them consider the pain they were heaping upon the families of the dead as they sought to justify the deaths at the hands of his agents, deaths that never should have happened?

Compare his behavior with that of President Obama at the funeral of Rev. Clemente Pinckney in 2015. Pinckney and seven of his parishioners were martyrs of racism. The country came together to call the heinous act what it was. It frightens me to imagine how our current president would respond in that situation.

How do we get through the next three years, where snark and smears and lies are the norm? How do we keep up our spirits as this administration treats citizens and visitors alike as though they have only the rights he wishes to bestow?

All of us deserve to be treated with dignity. We deserve due process when we are accused. We deserve an administration that is working for our good and not for personal enrichment. We deserve an administration that understands decency is part of the job.

How do we get that decency back? It starts by making it clear that what he’s doing now is not OK with us.