"MAGA"

At this point I think we all recognize the calling card of the current president and his supporters. "Make America Great Again" is what we all hear them shout. It's what we see plastered all over the place but it's not just in the forms of hashtags, it's an attitude of sorts and it's not a good one. "Why wouldn't it be a good one? Isn't it telling us to make this country great again?" is something an idiot might ask. Yes it is forcefully telling people to "make America great again" but what the hell does that even mean? "Again" implies that there was some idyllic past that we're being called to return to but I've never once heard a clear answer as to what they're referring to. I've heard vague answers such as "It's a mindset!" but that begs the question of what god forsaken mindset!? When do people think this country was great? I've heard a few answers and none of them are great. Some have said the 80's, some have said the 50's, some have said "WW2!" and when I asked the question broadly to people on social media, the only person who answered (I don't have many friends who are fans of Trump) said just after 9/11. These are all awful answers because none of those periods were "great" in every aspect in my mind. WW2 was a time of crisis in this country, the 50's were rife with overt racism and obscene medical and psychological practices, the 80's was the decade in which the phrase "greed is good" was coined and homophobia was rampant, and the years following 9/11, which I experienced personally, were full of faux patriotism thinly masking horrendous Islamophobia. "But you're just rattling off all the bad things about those times, there were good things too!" is another thing an idiot might say. You can't separate the bad from the good, they're intrinsically connected and to say that we should go back to those times means that we're accepting the whole package. No thank you. "Great" is a very arbitrary term. What might be great for one person might be horrible for another, and I think such a broad thing should really be elaborated on, but I'm not holding my breath. I say that because when people say "it's a mindset" they really do mean that. I think many of the people who wear those hats don't really have any particular time in mind that they're thinking of, they just wear them because of their blind adoration of the president. I've come to understand that this is my main problem with my approach to attempting dialogue with Trump supporters; I don't think the way they do. At the end of the day, Donald Trump is a very simplistic man. His messages are simple, his plans are simple, and his supporters too are simple. Obviously most people aren't used to operating on that kind of wavelength so communication is difficult and convincing them with reason is all but impossible. Look at what I'm doing right now, do you honestly think any Trump supporter has taken the time to dissect his catch phrase in this way? I don't think so. I could be wrong, but from what I've seen of them, I doubt it. I think they just sort of go with whatever he says, but I've already written about his supporters so let's get back to the phrase itself. MAGA sounds patriotic, it sounds like a call to restore the nation to glory, which would be all well and good accept for what people think that glory is. If you think the glory days were anything that I've heard people say before than I would strongly disagree. Why I really dislike the phrase isn't necessarily how widespread it's become, although that's very annoying, it's that it's inherently geared towards pushing the country backwards. It's saying that there was this great past that we need to return to instead of building a better future. It's saying that there was something in the past that worked and we need to go back to that. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. It's really no surprise that the slogan has resonated with conservatives, since conservatism itself is all about maintaining the past. Hell, "conserve" is in the name, but again I disagree with that. We live in a world that's constantly changing. Even if something worked in the past, the world isn't the same as it was back then and we need to find something new that will work in order to push us towards the future. MAGA is all about looking on the past with rose colored glasses and I can't stand that. I'm not saying the past is completely useless and irrelevant, but what I am saying is that it should be learned from and built on instead of recreated. At the end of the day, MAGA isn't about moving forward, it's about turning the clocks back. This is the inherent flaw of the slogan.