I’m afraid. I’m very afraid.
Not from school, not from how safe I feel walking alone to my car in the dark, but from the primaries.
I’ve been following the 2016 election ever since the words were first uttered and people have started guessing at who was running. Now that the primaries for North Carolina are starting soon there’s a joke that has become a nightmare: Donald Trump.
At first, I thought it was kind of a joke that he was running. Millionaire businessmen run almost every election cycle, and typically drop out or have a very small percentage of votes as a third party candidate.
Trump, however, isn’t really following either of these trends. He won the primaries in states like South Carolina and is leading in most of the polls I’ve seen for GOP candidates.
He has a chance.
This scares me to no end. Why? He reminds me of Hitler.
Now, for background, when Hitler came into power in Germany, there was an economic depression from WWI. Hitler fixed the economic depression, but then went on the single most intense genocidal dictatorship the world has seen. Six million Jews and countless others groups of people in Europe.
It all started simply enough. Fear mongering. Using propaganda to make everyone afraid of a group of people, propose mass deportations and identifying markers.
Hitler did it, and it turned to genocide.
Trump is proposing it, just with a different group of individuals.
My fear, my grand fear, is that history will indeed repeat itself. Trump gets elected. Trump fixes the economy or something like that. Trump deports the members of the Muslim community and makes them wear identifying markers.
I’m scared another genocide will happen.
Fear is what is driving his campaign. Fear of terrorism by a very small number of extremists.
America is based upon values like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This includes freedom of religion, not the isolation of a particular religion based on the actions of few. That is what I forsee.
In America we are blessed with the right to choose our leader, I get that. However, I don’t understand wanting to elect candidates that want to strip rights from citizens based on their religion (also where would we even deport them to). I don’t understand why people can’t see the similarities between now and what happened starting almost a century ago in Germany.
Germany wanted to be great again too.