I Didn't Fear The Orange Man

I know I wanted to talk less about politics but even with that, a lot of the things that are happening currently just remind me of the observations I keep making to how news is reported to us now and why I think it was a massive mistake to try to make news into 'entertainment' in order to 'appeal to new generations'.

With this thought, I keep going back and forth on whether or not News Outlets should even have social media accounts because on one hand, it does work for smaller headlines that can link back to the main articles on their own sites but on the other I remember all the times this sort of format has been abused and the news itself has devolved into this mess that sounds as dumb and is misinformed as a Buzzfeed article, all for the sake of 'trending'.

Hell, I'm not the only person who has mentioned how news and reporting no longer care about being being CORRECT but being FIRST which has lead to the news turning into a cesspool. Granted, a lot of people will say that the news has always been about sensationalism and to that....yes, yes it has but from the last 4 years it feels like it has gotten WORSE.

I just want to make this clear; no, I did not vote for Trump but within that I DO NOT HATE HIM. I also don't FEAR him. I never saw him as a threat to my humanity but for 4 years that was what I was told to FEEL. I was told to fear for my human rights as a Black person, as Black woman because somehow Trump was suddenly going to do a bunch of rewriting of laws and then I wouldn't have rights?

And did that happen?

NO, it did not.

But nearly everyone I knew was screaming and panicking as if it were happening and as I said, I kept watching how people reacted due to what they listened to on the news, mostly CABLE news.

Not LOCAL news. CABLE news. And on top of that, radio celebrities as well. This is where they were getting their 'information' from and within these four years, it made them angered, bitter, and panicked. And they could never once answer me when I asked them WHY or HOW they thought Trump was with a dictator or a fascist. Their answers were either 'LOOK!' as if that meant something or 'BECAUSE!'

Because WHAT? BECAUSE itself isn't an answer. TELL me why you think he's a fascist or a dictator and telling me because the NEWS SAID SO isn't an answer because THEY never said what made him the definition of those things. They even claimed any meeting of Trump supporters were like Clan Rallies but again, HOW?

So by this logic, ANY meeting of large groups for political functions could be compared to with clan rallies, all because THEY CAN. 

I think the worst thing to take away from this wasn't what Trump did at any moment of time when he was President but rather what people SAID he would do. It was four years of 'He will-' and not 'He did-' and the only 'He did-' people ever talked about were shit he said on Twitter. How and WHY is that shit we should care about and why were his Twitter posts reported MORE than what he was doing in the WHITE HOUSE? But again, no one said anything to this and took that his posts on Twitter were a direct reflection to what he was doing in OFFICE, all because they saw it on CNN or heard from someone else.

There's also the massive divide that was created around people due to all this constant negativity. If there was a rise in racism at any time it was thanks in part to, once again, how the news reported it and how people took it up. All the 'he will-' shit that made people think that anyone who was a Trump support was going to kill them and by proxy anyone who was White was a Trump supporter by default. And as a result, people developed a sense to mistrust each other just at a glance without listening to a single word they said.

Almost as if racism is manufactured by those with a lot of clout and power that will rain down on everyone else that will force a divide that would have never existed in the first place had they not been made to fear or hate someone based on lies spread around.

But it's not like people were warning others about this.

tl;dr- politics suck but this 'new day of hope' was manufactured much as was the constant fear from the LAST four years. Think for a moment; if you remove all the constant drama that news outlets were constantly spewing away from the facts of what was going on, Trump's presidency would have been a dull one given the things that DID with the only exception being 2020 as a whole which effected EVERYONE. And I think that's what they knew. They knew they didn't have all the juicy shit they wish they could have so they HAD to keep harping on the same points and exaggerate shit otherwise they wouldn't have as much to report on other than the way he talks.

So even if I didn't vote for the dude, I don't blame him for the state of America. I blame the people who took advantage of the worries of people and only cared about ratings and clout for the state of America right now because they knew they had to run on something in order to stay relevant.

A lot of the problems that people talk about are social ills in the US have been around for years and were still a problem long before Trump was even in office. BLM first starting going around BEFORE he was even in office and was not a new thing neither was the issue on police brutality. The only difference was that people acted like it was suddenly an issue when it happened to George Floyd and tried to act like Trump had something to do with that when we can easily go back to cases of police brutality during the 'better days before Trump' but that's a whole other can of worms and people easily forgetting shit to make it out that Trump made all of these things happen NOW. I fucking got sick of it because it felt like an easy target to pretend people gave a fuck about issues. If they did, they would have done something about that shit before, not when it was an easy way to get fucking famous from it.

I think what I learned from the past 4 years is not to be panicked and fearful as I was seeing other people around me get. I'm wary, I understand my history but at the same time I'm not going to be fucking paranoid about it when I know most of the things they're telling us to fear isn't what we should be afraid of. I know my POV or experiences don't cover everyone and I'm not saying that they do or want them to be seen that way but I wanted to at least tell you guys WHY I didn't fear or hate Trump because I had not fucking reason to do so. I had other things going on in my life that I wanted to take care of and Trump had nothing to do with them nor did he hinder them. 

People who fucking acted like they were taking a stand against him DID, but that's a talk for another day. 

It's amazing how one man caused so much chaos in the country by doing NOTHING but rather letting everyone else do that work for him. 

That's it. I just wanted to get this off my chest.