Make America Kind Again

A lack of compassion in the United States has caused one of the greatest divisions in the country's history. There is a large group of people in this country who feel that they should only care for those who they can identify with, and that belief has destroyed what used to make people believe in society. We've forgotten how to trust and how to show compassion for other people in our society.

We have become a society of victim blaming and assuming that those who accuse are the real ones at fault, not the one being accused. A US Senate candidate has just been accused of sexually assaulting several women, many of whom are underaged, and the first reaction of many people in this nation is to assume that these women are lying in a politically motivated stunt. Now, all liberals jumping up and down need to remember that the left did the same thing to Lewinsky.

But even with politics removed, we blame the victim. When high school football players in a small town called Steubenville raped women at their school, the first reaction by the community was to become enraged at the accusers. They were called, as a teacher and mentor of mine would say, everything but a child of God. We've started to behave in manners that show that we as a society no longer give people the benefit of the doubt. In Steubenville, the girls were accused of lying to harm the players as if they really stand to gain anything from harming these football players.

Those living in Steubenville chose to believe that these girls were vindictive, hateful, and manipulative, and many believed that they deserved to be raped rather than believe that they were victims in this case and that they were raped by these athletes. But this is nowhere near the only case of this. During the Cosby trial, many said that this was just the White community trying to tear down a Black icon and that all of these women are lying.

We look to people who are on the side of road who are homeless, many of whom are veterans and instead of acting like they deserve to be helped, we act as if they're pretending to be homeless or that they would use that money on Drugs or booze and liquor. Countless cities have started to put spikes on certain public areas to keep homeless people from sleeping or loitering outside. This kind of depraved policy has to make you wonder if we've decided to transform our "war on poverty" into a "war on the impoverished."

But going even further, we look at anyone who comes to the United States with such a level of skepticism and cynicism that we have begun to believe that everyone who comes here has alternative motives and wishes to physically or monetarily harm the United States. How silly does that sound? We've also come to believe that we're the only country with any kind of a work ethic and have injected a toxic double standard into the public debate by arguing that immigrants don't work while then arguing that they take American jobs. This is done to keep them out and to turn the public against immigrants.

Looking further to how we treat immigrants, we allow anecdotal evidence of immigrants committing crimes to make us believe that all immigrants are here to commit violent murders and rapes. We've come to demonize immigrants to the point where we misunderstand them and their role here in the United States with over 70% of those in the Republican Party, according to a 2015 Pew Research Poll saying that they make crime and the economy worse, which has been disproven by several reports by the Wall Street Journal and ABC News.

This is all part of a wider problem. Our answers to problems involving how we interact with other people. Our answer has become, "It isn't my problem" whenever it comes to questions of healthcare, poverty, immigration, or international crises. Our overly skeptical society has started to show more and more disdain for people we don't know and can't identify with, treating their problems as less than, and treating them as liars rather than fellow citizens who are struggling through problems that they didn't deserve.

With so many people in America talking about Making America Great Again we need to focus first on making ourselves kind and caring again. If we lose sympathy, understanding, and empathy then we don't have a society worth saving. We seem to have this belief that we are the only ones with problems and that we have no time to worry about others. That has to end, and it has to end this very instant. Rape victims aren't liars, the homeless aren't thieves, and foreigners aren't evil.