Pink caps and the kkk

“I think Trump should make a speech. A real speech denouncing the ‘lowercase kkk’. Don’t tweet about me being lame, or the show being shame. Write a speech, a real speech. Because these people are out there, and it’s pissing a lot of people off. And I think you could make a difference.” – Aziz Ansari during his Saturday Night Live opening monologue

My sister sent me a picture of her daughter, my niece, preparing to march on Washington with 500,000+ other people. She was wearing a pink knit cap with little cat ears. I forwarded the picture to my kids indicating I didn’t understand the significance of the cat. My youngest enlightened me, it was a reaction to President Trump bragging about groping unsuspecting women in a 2005 recording leaked during the presidential race. Remember, “Grab ’em by the pu**y. You can do anything”.

The movement is called the Pussyhat Project and their goal was to make a visual statement on the first day of Trump’s administration to show that women stand united when it comes to protecting their rights. These marches weren’t just limited to Washington, people from across the country, even in my little community marching in the rain, banded together to create some energy and make some noise about women’s rights.

Our President’s twitter response: “Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.”

Amazing!

During Aziz Ansari’s opening monologue on Saturday Night Live he warned about the “lower-case KKK movement, casual white supremacy” that has been empowered by a Trump presidency. “The problem is, there’s a new group… I’m talking about this tiny slice of people that have gotten way too fired up about this Trump thing for the wrong reasons. I’m talking about those people where as soon as Trump won, they were like, ‘We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore! Wooo” Ansari said.

“No! No!” he continued “If you’re one of these people, please go back to pretending. You gotta go back to pretending. We’re sorry we never thanked you for your service, we never realized how much effort you were putting into the pretending, but you gotta go back to the pretending.”

Ansari put into words what I have been thinking, we don’t need to be afraid of the KKK. Those guys in their white J.C. Penny sheets and pointy hats are hiding out in some one stoplight town in Mississippi or Arkansas trying to infect the world with their bad websites and ill-prepared propaganda drawn in crayons. But the “lowercase kkk”, these are our neighbors, our co-workers, people we bump into everyday and they believe they have been empowered but Trump who did it with a wink, a nod and Steve Bannon who so famously said “Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely.”

There are a lot of movements afoot. That is good. Hopefully what will come out of these factions is not only a spotlight on the issues that affect us all but leadership, young people willing to run for public office in their communities, in their states and their nation, my nation and yours. Words are cheap, our President and his minions suffocate us with cheap words. But if we let our actions speak, actions of compassion, love and empathy we can destroy the words of hate and intolerance being spoken by just a few. Their numbers really aren’t that great and neither is their leadership.

“Our freedom of speech is freedom or death, We’ve got to fight the powers that be” – Public Enemy Fight the Power