It’s already become quite obvious what caused yesterday’s tragic air crash in Washington. That 29% of air traffic controllers who are not white and that 22% who are not male. Honestly, what do people expect when you allow women, non white people, disabled people, gay people, those with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities and ‘unqualified people’ to work in air traffic control? Clearly, it was an accident waiting to happen, which makes you wonder why an accident like this never happened when Joe Biden was president?
In reality, no one knows what caused the collision between a American Airlines passenger aircraft and a military helicopter and wild, almost certainly baseless, speculation helps no one, except deranged conspiracy theorists and the kind of people who voted for Donald Trump, who may or may not be the same people. What I find so sick and disgusting is how and why this piece of human excrement is now the leader of the western world.
Perhaps I am a little old fashioned but the first thing I thought about when I saw the news was how very sad it was. Scores of innocent lives ended in an instant. People like you and me, going about their business, and never completing their journey. It is of course imperative that the authorities, which are currently being pared to the bone by Trump’s incoming slash and burn government, are able to find the cause of the crash and to take measures to ensure something like it never happens again. I am not an expert on the US government’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies, but I somehow doubt that a lack of white men in the air traffic control room was a factor in this tragedy. However, I stand to be corrected (but not by Donald Trump, though). Only the mind of an evil bigot, an unhinged, fascist and narcissist would even suggest such a thing, but that’s exactly what he did.
At times like these, I wonder if there is any hope for mankind. After all, Trump won 77,284,118 votes in the 2024 presidential election and every single one of them must surely have known who and what they were voting for, including his views on ‘diversity’ and his preference for white male Americans in positions of power. The only exception to that is Trump’s penchant for marrying migrant women but that, I guess, is different. Clearly, Melania Trump does not suffer from’ severe intellectual’ disabilities. The right kind of foreigner, perhaps?
Here we have, writ large, what America has chosen with all free will to do. More worryingly, there will be a significant group of people who take him at his word. When someone shows you who they are, believe them, goes the old adage. Trump’s popularity across the pond and, worryingly, here at home should concern us all because here lies the road to fascism, the same one that led to World War Two that our forefathers fought on our behalf so that we may be free. I end with words written by the author and poet Michael Rosen:
I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.
Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you…
It doesn’t walk in saying,
“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”
