People tend to take the Trump phenomenon as a bad thing. They ritually associate his dominance as a problem. I contest, that this is not a bad thing. Even though he says things that imply banning of all Muslim entries or that foodstamps make people fat, I find his conversations healthy.
Let me explain.
Hidden animosity is a dangerous thing. People suffer more when silent frustration explodes. Silence leads to confirmation. You either converse with yourself and convince yourself on what you believe is right or you sit in closed rooms, talk to people who share the same beliefs and hence embrace the perceived reality as facts. This changes when you start talking in the public.
When the ideas, terrible ones, get a voice and land an audience; people react. There are basically two types of reactions that comes out of this: people either agree or they disagree. The former find comfort in the fact that they are not alone. It helps them and well, that’s the ‘bad’ part of the equation. The latter part is what we have to think about. The latter part is what is healthy with entities like trump-things.
People have reacted against Trump’s bigotry. As it is with media preferences, they get less coverage and seem to be less loud. However, that is not necessarily true. Obama for instance has been very vocal and efficient at countering Trump’s claims. He has not held back in emphasizing how important it is to him that America does not work on the footsteps dictated by Trump. Obama has not hidden on reiterating that Muslims cannot and must not be left alone in this post-ISIS world. A sidelined Muslim population is the worst decision that America can make; one that Trump is insistent on pushing the country to. However, Obama is not alone. Hordes have come out, in the streets or in the form of their media presences, to condemn Trump’s bigotry. An optimistic point here is that America is not alone in this reaction.
The advantages of public figures being so vocally bigoted is that they allow the public at large, within the country and beyond, to debate what they say and chose sides; passionately. Those who have reacted against Trump have taken upon themselves to embrace the Muslim populations and see to it that they are not delineated. There have been communal and social gatherings that have been arranged to either listen to what the Muslims have to say, to explain their point of view or, on to make them a bigger, stronger part of their community.
The concept that is being challenged by these individuals is the phenomenon of glocalisation. Opinions such as Trump’s pushs the minorities, the Muslims in this case, to glocalise. By glocalise, I mean to further penetrate deep into the bubbles of their own making. For a minority, these bubbles border around their comfort zones. These bubbles are in the form of national groups where a replication of the national culture is sought amongst people who share the common national lineage. Such people speak the same language they did back at home, more so out of a duty to their ‘identity’ than their comfort zones. They embrace the culture to the whole; at times even more than they would have back at home. In these shells, the same problem of delusion and self-nurturing takes place that this column started with.
Such people believe firmly in prejudices, are vulnerable to being sensitized and tend to get addicted to introverted agitation. In these bubbles, these people form an alternate version of events. While some of these assumptions could reflect reality, most don’t. The exaggeration provides the environment that groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda search for. The glocalisation hence becomes the painful implication of a society that has dealt with the things in the worst manner.
Trump seeks to push Muslims to do just that. Almost everyone understands that and some public figures seek to challenge these occurrences. However, besides the governmental actions, there needs to be a larger, more elaborative and intensive social movements that counter the alienation of these individuals. In a way, this is indeed the only way to counter growing fundamentalism in countries across the world.
Many people I have conversed with, all across the world, have given me a somewhat similar picture of the conditions they face. The world today is more tolerant than it was in the wee days post 9/11. Yes, there are the bigots but there is a larger population that counters these bigots. The society is not a lost cause, it never really was. Hence, it is these venues that need to be approached at to counter bigotry.
People like Trump make the job easy for us. They push the world to speak, to ridicule them to work towards a world that is the opposite of what such leaders envision.