The tears Trump causes Americans abroad.

Trump politicises the lives of less than 1% of people some Americans among them which he turns into a demand of 100% support to be able to group stereotype and justify is using them as domestic punching bags. When it’s that 1% of America that is now treating it as their own personal feifdom or colony and remaining silent. Real abuse consistently punches down. Punching up isn’t what Trump makes it out to be it’s “justified criticism” in a Real Democracy. Is America a Real Democracy or a dying one? Before or after Trump America needs sure as hell needs CPR. (ODT)

I leave the U.S. often, ironically, and I have been fortunate to live and study and work abroad in countries from Mexico and Argentina to Spain and the U.K.—experiences that have thrown the good and the bad the U.S. has to offer into high relief. On the days when I read the news, I can’t imagine how I can love the country I still, sometimes reluctantly, call home, but I try to remember what the great James Baldwin said in an interview with the Paris Review:

I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else. At least not in a single lifetime, or, if you do, you’ll be aware of precisely what it means, knowing that your real roots are always elsewhere. If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind.

I’m trying not to go blind, even though the tears that come more and more often these days make it harder than ever to see the nation for which my parents gave up so much to call their own.

via I Know What It’s Like to Be Told to ‘Go Back’ to My Own Country | The Smirking Chimp