If you support Donald Trump for president, please stop. Listen to what he says, and the far-reaching ramifications of such talk to ignite more acts of cruelty, and fuel the fires of hatred that divide and diminish us.
Look also at history. "How could this happen?" is often the foremost question about the Holocaust. As the author of Needle in the Bone: How a Holocaust Survivor and Polish Resistance Fighter Beat the Odds and Found Each Other, I've found that most historians agree that this nightmare of humanity didn't manifest within days or even months, but came out of incremental changes, some seemingly small and some huge, that systematically stripped Jews and others (gay and lesbian people, Roma people, people with disabilities, political opponents) of their rights, particularly their right to live.
So many of these incremental changes had to do with language, such as referring to Jews as vermin, something not human that wreaks havoc and should be eliminated. Out of such language came lots of permission and even encouragement for people to act out of anti-Semitism and other forms of communal hatred. Words matter, and they can lift us up, or lead us down the rabbit hole to hell. Joshua Greene, author and filmmaker of Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, told me as I was writing Needle in the Bone, "When we turn away from our nature, we can fall very far." Trump's comments about "the other" speak to how low we can go when we act from our most fearful and angry selves. So instead, ask yourself these and other questions that speak to our highest values and most cherished beliefs:
- Do You Respect Freedom of Religion? Trump calls for Muslims to be prevented from immigrating to the U.S., and some of his supporters, such as N.H. Representative Al Baldasaro, New Hampshire, co-chair of Trump's state veterans coalition, added, "What he's saying is no different than the situation during World War II, when we put the Japanese in camps." Asked whether Trump supported the U.S. Incarceration of approximately 120,000 of its citizens of Japanese descent during World War II, Trump told Time Magazine, "I would have had to be there at the time, to give you a proper answer." That response alone is chilling. Furthermore, lumping all Muslims with extreme Jihadists is akin to grouping all Christians with Oklahoma City terrorist Timothy McVeigh. Most Muslims, according to polls and research, don't support suicide bombings or attacks like what just happened in San Bernardino (see this Pew Research Center poll on Muslim country attitudes toward Isis). Are you appalled by the idea of a religious litmus test for all who want to enter the U.S.? Do you believe freedom of religion is one of our most sacred values, in fact, one on which our country was founded?
All of us are better than this kind of talk, and to find ways to move together as a nation as well as in our thousands of communities, we need to reject the rhetoric of hate. I'm not asking you to support my candidates or positions--by all means, find and support your own, but let's act as much as we can from our best possible selves who believe in the inalienable rights of all people for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.