Indianz.Com > News > Tim Giago: What went wrong with America?
20th Century Studios: High Anxiety
Notes from Indian Country
What went wrong with America?
Wednesday, November 18, 2020

In 1977 Mel Brooks produced a movie called “High Anxiety” and it dawned on me this week, after all of the trauma since November 3, that this is the feeling most average Americans are now experiencing – high anxiety.

The election is over. Joe Biden is now the President-elect of the United States. But Donald Trump has locked himself in the bathroom and refuses to come out. And to make matters worse, his GOP colleagues are accepting this behavior as normal. It makes many of us wonder what in the hell America has come to.

With a coronavirus pandemic raging across America, with people dying needlessly, and with an economy about to sink into the abyss, we are wondering if there will ever be such a thing as normal. All of the abnormal antics of the child in the White House have been accepted by the Republicans. Trump is being treated like a naughty child whose abnormal behavior will cause no harm.

His refusal to admit defeat and to make every effort to overturn the legitimate election and his refusal to allow a normal presidential transition is doing great harm to this country.

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Supporters of Donald Trump at the U.S. Supreme Court on November 7, 2020. 2020. Photo by Indianz.Com (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The time has come to put America’s budget together and Trump has decided to push his own budget through without allowing President-elect Biden to put his budget first. Perhaps Biden had things in his budget that would benefit Indian Country that Trump does not have in his. That means Native Americans are being dragged into Trump’s little temper tantrums as innocent victims. And the team that Biden put together to take on the coronavirus pandemic will not be able to swing into action until January 20 when Trump’s term expires and in the interim thousands more Americans will die.

This total lack of empathy for his fellow Americans exposes what many of us have known all along: Trump does not care for anyone but himself. And yet he has 73 million people who voted for him. Go ahead and scratch your head because that is what many of us are doing.

There was one of Trump’s crazies at the rally held in Washington on Saturday, a rally intended to support Trump’s claims that he was cheated out of the election, holding up a poster that read, “Coming for black and Indians, first welcome to the new world order.” Now what in the world does that mean?

It seems that this election of 2020 was not so secretively an election pitting whites against all minorities. These white elitists are well aware that in the next 10 years they will be the minority and that scares the hell out of them. They are so afraid that when black, Indians, and other minority races become the majority that they will be treated the way they treated those minorities all of these years. The fact of the matter is that this election proved that they are not the majority any longer. They are still trying to show that they are better than anyone else and it is no longer working.

When the Black Lives Matter protestors marched through the cities this summer their ranks were mixed with people of many races. This coming together of races really frightened the white supremacists. This is when they started to come out of the woodwork and push with all of their might to keep their racist leader in power. For the first time in their lives they became truly frightened of the minority races.

Can any American who lived through and fought through World War II ever imagine that there would be other Americans wearing the Nazi swastikas and marching through the streets of American cities waving their flags and shouting anti-Semitic slogans? When these white supremacists ran into a crowd of anti-protestors, their beloved leader Trump said, “There were good people on both sides.” One can only wonder what in the hell the American presidency has come down to.

No, there were not good people on both sides and most Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Asian Americans know this. When white supremacists carry flags that shout out a “new world order,” it is time for every American to take notice.

Tim Giago. Photo courtesy Native Sun News Today

I say “most Americans” because believe it or not there were Native Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans who supported Trump. That still puzzles the hell out of me.

And there were American veterans who supported Trump even after he called them losers. And let’s not forget the worst hypocrites of all; the evangelicals. Trump profaned everything their Holy Bibles taught them was a sin and yet they considered him a demi-God. He lied profusely, fornicated with prostitutes while his wife was 7 months pregnant, paid them off with campaign money, cheated on his taxes, snuggled up to dictators, and showed himself to be a bigot and racist, and yet there were people who still loved and supported him.

Again I can only ask, what in hell has become of America? Hurry up Joe, take office and make America right and just again. Help us get over this “high anxiety.”


Tim Giago (Oglala Lakota) is the founder of the Native American Journalists Association and of Indian Country Today. Contact him at najournalist1@gmail.com

Note: Content © Tim Giago