Showing posts with label Muslims. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muslims. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

The American President: Donald Trump & The Societal Exposé, Part 3


As a tenth grader at School Without Walls Senior High School in Northwest D.C., my exceptionally brilliant humanities teacher steered us away from generic textbooks and encouraged us to consult primary source information first when it came to understanding social, political and historical events.  Her thinking was that general and secondary sources allowed for less detail and more cultural bias whereas primary source information was directly from the people with the experience(s) being researched.  Apparently, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump doesn't believe in that as he is a constant violator of former New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs coach Herman Edwards' "Don't Hit Send" warning.  Whether it's via social media or just opening his mouth, Trump says whatever he wants whenever he desires without any defendable form of mental preparedness, verification or fact checking until someone corrects him.  As problematic as this is for a presidential candidate, he is representative of an even larger dilemma in American society: taking information as presented from questionable sources to make an argument without enough supporting facts from more reliable sources.  Hence, in this third installment of "The American President: Donald Trump & The Societal Exposé", I will get into Trump potentially being the poster child of America's miseducation...

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

The American President: Donald Trump & The Societal Exposé, Part 1


Observing the meteoric rise of businessman Donald Trump during his campaign for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, several pundits, political analysts and social media experts have run to the same defense: "There's no way that Trump can win the general election.  The American voter is much smarter than that and this would be an insult to their intelligence."  However, let's keep it 100: is the rise of Trump and the real possibility that he could be the 45th President an insult to the American voter and the democratic political process that we darn near deify, or is it an indictment of America?  At so many patriotic events, we are encouraged to sing Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A. Ward's "America the Beautiful" as a sign of our solidarity with what is often billed as "the greatest" or "the most powerful" nation in the world.  Given the historically divisive social climate in our country, how "beautiful" is or has America ever been and to what "greatness" is Trump truly returning us?  He represents everything that many Americans--regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, generational gap, religion, etc.--believe and exhibit, whether they realize it or not.  In a four-part series over the next several weeks, I intend to highlight many of the harsh and sobering realities about America and manifest just how "American" Donald Trump is...