Mon, 10 Apr 2017 12:04:40 +0000
Mr. President, avoid the American tragedy
By Donald Chanda
| In May last year during the campaigns, the Economist Magazine carried a cover story you entitled “Trump’s triumph, Americas tragedy”. At that time, given the win in primaries, it was clear that you would now run for presidency on the Republican ticket. Yes, you have triumphed to presidency. |
I think you can avoid America’s tragedy predicted by the Economist Magazine by saying and doing the right policy –actions that a US president should do. I wish to first express my fear that an American tragedy has a danger of turning into a global tragedy.
The populist call you made to the Americans who voted for you was that you will make America great again by bringing and creating more jobs for Americans by stopping various immigrants and keeping away the potential terrorists from certain suspected countries (among many other promises you made).
Mr. President, you do not need to visit and tour a political museum to know that populist politics are dangerous. They often result in disaster in two ways. One is that, when you fail to carry out your populist promises, your message becomes hollow, outdated and worn-out. The next thing is that you will be voted out and you will a single term president.
Yes, it is possible to come up with another set of populist slogans, use the state system and win a second term but the effects of populism will haunt the American society for a long time to come.
This Mr. President, you should avoid. The second way is that populist promises tend to lead to discrimination of others by advantaging Americans. This as a policy is bad in a free world, especially that America boasts as a leader of the free world. Discriminatory practices, whether racial, sex, religious, cultural or linguistic are bad and not needed in our ever growing globalized world.
History is full of evidence of horrendous, barbaric, inhuman killing of people based on discrimination of one form or another. Most genocides tend to emanate from discrimination. Nazi German ended up with the Holocaust. In Africa, in 1994, in Rwanda, we had that experience based on tribal discrimination. Even on jobs, we have witnessed xenophobic attacks in South Africa where Africans coming from other African countries have been attacked.
Mr. President, discrimination in whatever form is not the right thing to do. It is not Presidential-it is not correct for any president to discriminate, using words or actions because that belongs to the politics of the distant past when human rights and justice where left in the hands of a single king, Monarch or dictator. None of these titles carry the primitive barbaric acts they used to be associated with.
Mr. President, you can and should avoid the tragedy that comes with discriminatory politics. Do not discriminate against others, lest they retaliate and we put the world on a collision path. Practically all wars tend to originate from the discriminatory acts.
The results have been disastrous. Mr. President, it is not long ago that a female Mayor of a small town in the USA resigned after making discriminatory remarks against the immediate past First Lady, Michelle Obama that ‘she was tired of seeing a monkey in high heeled shoes at White House’. The Obamas consigned that discriminatory remark to the dustbin of nonsense where it rightly belongs.
At this age and era, any person who cherishes a public office cannot afford discrimination in either words or actions. The mayor resigned because such words are not worthy in leadership. President Obama had to simply ignore a lot of racial remarks in in the US itself and outside the US.
The Philippines President Deurte literally insulted President Obama using racial discriminatory words when President was in that part of the world just before leaving office. Again, President Obama’s reaction was the correct reaction for a public leader. I do not know the political history of the President of the Philippines but such a remark stinks of political thuggery and hooliganism.
Mr. President, American people are all over the world, working, some are volunteers, others are providing expertise yet others are learning and touring. We do not want to discriminate against them. We want to work with them, do business with them in a fair way, to both them and us.
We should work as a people together without those emotive discriminatory prejudices that are divisive to humanity. Mr. President, yes, you have triumphed as the Economist Magazine predicted but you should avoid a US tragedy by doing the right things that a president should do in the White House.
