Sue

“Failing to demand a reckoning for atrocities, even retrospectively, creates a situation in which we ensure such atrocities or crimes or transgressions will happen again. Failing to call them out is to condone them.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“But what else do you call it when a mob of white men shouts “Jews will not replace us” in the service of protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee? How else do you describe a party that didn’t just tolerate but supported putting children in concentration camps; suppressing dissent during peaceful Black Lives Matter protests with seemingly unidentified paramilitaries; dismantling truth and distrusting reality; designating a free press and whistleblowers as enemies of the people—and by extension of the state? How do you describe a party that made one of its chief goals the theocratization of the federal judiciary? If anybody thinks after all of this that calling them fascist is rude, then we have a very serious problem.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“One of the worst things that was done to us during the year of COVID was the purposeful attempt to divide us and further isolate us from one another. One of the very few mitigating factors of mass trauma is the sense that we are all in it together. In times of war, for example, suicide rates go down because there is a sense of common purpose. Members of the Trump administration made that impossible not because they were incompetent but because they thought it was a winning strategy. Promoting divisiveness among us suited their purposes, just as setting up a false dichotomy between the pandemic and the economy did. In real time it could be hard to gauge how cynical and cruel this ploy was, but in retrospect the extent of the deliberate sabotage is breathtaking. It’s hard to grapple with what was taken from us and even harder to fathom the depth of depravity required to do the taking.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

“White Americans worry that by acknowledging the atrocities of the past, the guilt of the actual perpetrators will somehow attach to us, while it’s the failure to acknowledge those atrocities that makes us complicit. We as a nation cannot begin to heal unless we face our past head-on with complete honesty and begin to understand how our country’s legacy continues to affect every aspect of our lives.”
― Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal