Don’t let Trump drag us backwards

Californians see ourselves as tolerant and inclusive. Now comes an attorneygeneral’s report showing a 17.4 per cent spike in hate crimes last year. Such incidents, after a long decline, have been drifting upward since 2015.

But last year’s burst of hatred was a substantially bigger increase than either of the prior two years. Local law enforcement agencies in California logged nearly 1100 crimes against people in 2017 because of their race, ethnicity, creed, gender or sexual orientation.

The 30,000-foot explanation, of course, is human nature. A critical state audit this year also may have encouraged reporting and bumped up some statistics. But this, as we say too often now, isn’t normal. Violence of this sort also rises and falls in inverse proportion to the quality of our leaders, and tracks our insecurity about change and our capacity to adapt to it.

Californians were mostly managing that insecurity, despite tectonic shifts in climate, technology and the economy. But now we are led by a president and an administration that runs on and exploits fear – fear of brown people, LGBT people, non-Christian people, educated people, female people, people even from countries that have long been our allies. And humans remain human, which is why, for all that experience, we remain susceptible to fear. Let’s try not to be.