Lighting the flame

So you go up to the craziest young man in the neighborhood and hand him a full gasoline can, some rags and a lighter. Then you point at a house in the neighborhood and say, “All the problems in this neighborhood stem from that house.” Then you walk away.

Shortly thereafter, the craziest young man in the neighborhood sets that house ablaze and people die. Then, when the craziest young man in the neighborhood is arrested and tells authorities that you influenced him to set the house on fire and even provided the fuel for the inferno that killed the people inside, you say, “But I never told him to start a fire.”

That’s what Donald Trump and his defenders are saying now, that Trump never advocated the conflagration of race- and religion-based mass murders plaguing our nation, most recently in Gilroy and El Paso and previously in Poway and Pittsburgh. But Trump has been denigrating ethnic and religious minorities and undocumented immigrants and refugees since he began his presidential bid, using dehumanizing language and even laughing during a recent rally at the suggestion that certain such people be shot.

When you suggest to four minority congresswomen that if they don’t like the direction in which Trump is taking the country that they should go back to where they’re from, even though three were born in the United States and all four are U.S. citizens, that’s pouring fuel on the fire of racial hate. When you vilify a black lawmaker and disparage his mostly minority district, you’re throwing a log on the blaze of racism. When you call swaths of people of color “rapists,” “criminals” and “animals” and use terms such as “infestation” and “invasion” to characterize the movements of certain folks, certain other folks think an inferno of violence is being summoned.

I’ve lived in this mostly minority community, made up largely of immigrants, for much of my life. Yes, I recently chided certain people here to do a better job of picking up after themselves, to make our community even better. But I think I’m richer for the experience of living in this diverse community.

I also grew up in a town that was diverse, with many Dust Bowl-refugee families and many first-generation Mexican-Americans and Filipino-Americans. There were lots of other people of various ethnicities, particularly Italian-Americans and Portuguese-Americans, mostly second generation. Later, in our high school years, African-American kids came into the mix.

All in all, we got along well. Almost all of us were lower-middle-class, and someone’s race or where their parents came from was not a consideration when it came to friendship. There were more important things that went into that calculation, like what sports you played or what baseball cards you had.

Now, more than 40 years later, I see on Facebook that many of the white guys I grew up with, the same fellows who were close friends with guys named Raul, Jose and Manuel, are buying into the racial resentment burning in this country, as stoked by Trump. They argue — and I read what they write, often with deep sadness — that this generation of Rauls, Joses and Manuels is different, that many folks are not coming legally, and even those who are here legally are reluctant to learn the language and acculturate to our country. They insist that instead of adjusting to the United States, these new immigrants want the United States to adjust to their ways. They insist our nation is changing for the worse as a result.

That’s the angry mindset Trump is hoping to tap into to win re-election.

And we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks how dangerous that mindset can be in certain twisted brains once the match is struck.

Bret Kofford teaches writing at San Diego State University-Imperial Valley. His opinions don’t necessarily reflect those of SDSU or its employees. Kofford can be reached at kofford@roadrunner.com