It seems as though every time I read the news my blood pressure increases exponentially. This current administration failure to provide the country with a single stable week since inauguration is starting to wear on the American psyche (or at least my own). Comedy shows don't even have to write their own material anymore. With all this chaos, how are we supposed to cope?
The attractive answer is to avoid the news at all costs. If you don't know what's going on, you don't need to care, right? Sounds great until we are living under a military state. A better answer is to glean anything positive, literally anything positive at all, that we can from the federal government's current state of affairs.
Personally, I tend to focus on the negative, so I have found something that is not so much positive as much as it is a learning experience. Our government was built with a system of checks and balances in place. What this its supposed to mean is that one branch of the government doesn't get too much power. The current administration aside, the presidents since FDR have enjoyed implementing executive actions without much resistance. None of these executive actions have generally affected middle class white America, hence, there was not much resistance in the mainstream media (except for more conservative outlets, which were probably predicated on who the president was, at least for the last eight years).
What middle class white America forgot, though, was that eventually some guy would come around that didn't understand that white America would be happy as long as they weren't directly affected or benefited from legislation. A guy that wouldn't tiptoe around implementing legislation that benefited only people in his financial position and placated a select group of supporters. People voted for him that, for some reason, didn't believe he would do exactly as he said he would and are now facing financial repercussions, are starting to become unhappy, which almost every news media reflects.
So where do we turn to now?
I suspect that most people of color living in America have known that the justice and legislative system in this country are rigged (to steal the President's words). If you don't believe me, a good place to start is the Netflix documentary 13th, or Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching, by Mychal Denzel, for starters. Taking my word for it would be an actual disservice to the people it directly affects, but I digress. The problem for the current administration is that white people are actually noticing how dysfunctional the federal government is, an idea that was only a suspicion before this year.
This, however annoying it may be to those who have noticed this for a long time, is a good thing for America. We have found that our judicial system, while still needing a ton of work, is more or less politically neutral. Executive orders have been struck down and declared unconstitutional. So we know they work on a federal level (if not an individual one). More people are paying attention to how the government works.
They also are beginning to pay attention to the way the government doesn't work. Notably, Congress is unable to stand up to the executive branch in recent weeks. They have fallen prey to putting party over the people, arguably on both sides, and are an ineffective branch of government. They get paid off by corporations to write laws, effectively losing the ability to speak for their constituents. Americans noticing that a branch of government that they pay for doesn't work is good news for all people, but bad news for Congress. I take hope in the fact that more people care enough to know their state representatives now, that they have attended town halls to argue against the reduction of basic needs such as access to healthcare.
More people are noticing our government now. They are noticing how it fails and directly impacts their day to day life. They are starting to speak up. So if our legislative branch wants to keep receiving money from lobbyists, they should at least pretend to listen. And to those who have realized that our government has been stacked against them before the inception of America, we, as white people, owe a sincere apology.
