Find Me Serenity

Don’t worry. This will be my last rant-y entry for a while. Stay tuned next week for lots of gushing about nerdy things and swooning over comics, concerts and comedy. Today though. Let’s talk about Donald Trump.

In his speech announcing his candidacy, Trump made racist comments about immigrants, specifically those coming over from Mexico. He called them drug dealers and rapists. Because Americans don’t do that, we have to import the criminals. Right?

In the fall out from these absolutely ridiculous insensitive comments nearly all companies that have ever done business with the Donald ran away screaming “we’re not with him!” Which is admirable. But.

You knew there was going to be a but.

See, Donald Trump has always had that point of view. It is not new. That did not seem to matter to NBC, Macy’s, Univision and the countless other companies that pulled funding for various events, not to mention the people who pulled out of the Miss Universe pageant. It was alright when he was making inane comments about building invisible walls to keep these criminals out of our country, but now that he’s made it into a big “I’m going fix this country” presidential hopeful speech, they’re up in arms about being in business with him.

NBC had other reasons to sever ties. As part of the fair and equal time rule (I don’t know if that’s really what it’s called, it just sounded good), they would have to put every candidate on their channel for the amount of time they are airing Trump’s show “The Apprentice.” But instead they cited his immigration stance as their reasoning.

We have this habit of being outraged only at convenient times and things that either benefit us, or are at the forefront of news and current events. We rail against, shun, refuse to acknowledge. And then that news item gets replaced by a new one and we rail against, shun…and forget to continue to be mad about that other thing.

I heard or read recently that we have a right to freedom of speech but not freedom of consequences. I wish that more people understood that. We need to remember that the consequences do not go away because the media coverage moves on or the person goes quiet.

Donald Trump has always been racist and he will always be racist. Despite the fall out of his speech he has not made any effort to learn from his mistakes. His pseudo apology news tour only made matters worse. He has no idea what was wrong about his statement. As a matter of fact he recently said he had no idea it would have such a negative response.

Never forget it.