When browsing the news on your TV, it has become increasingly difficult to avoid one word: impeachment. The current American political landscape is being dominated by the impeachment inquiry recently lodged against President Donald Trump. It is becoming one of the defining hot button topics of the 21st century, and will most likely be looked back upon as a defining historical event, considering Trump is only the 4th president to be put through an inquiry of impeachment.
Many Americans are confused and bewildered by the true breadth of this political event. What makes it even more difficult to grasp is the amount of false information about the impeachment inquiry circulating in the American news cycle. Most recently, President Trump claimed that the impeachment inquiry was a “witch hunt.” Already unrealistic and dramatic, Trump upped the ante and labeled it a lynching. Completely unrelated to the current state of affairs , lynching was a practice used to hang and murder African Americans, by which without trial, people were hung by a mob in front of a large group of people, often paying for a crime they did not commit. Lynching was primarily used from the mid-1800’s to the mid 20th century. The NAACP estimates that 4,743 human beings were lynched between 1882 and 1968.
Calling this a lynching is not only racist, ignorant, and blatantly offensive, but an example of the President’s disregard for and little knowledge of America’s greatest shame. How can we truly bring ourselves as a nation into a post-Jim Crow society when the term “lynching” is misunderstood by the face of our nation. How can a leader who claims to represent the people blatantly offend so many? The answer is clear. Often in the American politisphere, it is not the most supported voice that is heard, but the loudest. In the past 3 years, the voice that has risen above them all has seldom been that of reason. The voice has been that of the uneducated and the ignorant: the Trump supporter.
What many Americans (especially those living in liberal “bubbles” like the Bay Area) fail to understand is that America is bigger than they would like to believe it is. The world a Bay Area native lives in is not the average world of an American. Most Americans do not live in the most progressive state in the union. Many don’t go to a school with comprehensive sex education, or without the pledge of alliegiance. Many American students live in areas or in situations that repress their right to a secular education. There are kids whose Fathers are members of the Ku Klux Klan. There are people in this country who do not think like a Californian. And while we may not want to believe it, it is the harsh reality of our nation. Understanding that harsh reality is the first step to a less racist, modernized, happier nation. A nation in which we do not throw around the term “lynching.”