Focus on the soul alive

"You gotta know that some people are soul dead;  they will never hear.  They have no ability to do anything but promote evil.  If I can say one thing to you, focus your energy on those who can hear."  -from Yearning Wild by R. Glendon Brunk

A silver lining to the Trump presidential candidacy is that it puts all the "soul dead" people into one group:  Trump supporters.  We can recognize that they will never hear and move on.  The problem is that it is incredibly difficult to move on when you hear all the vile filth they spill forth into the world.  I believe the racial violence we've been experiencing is exacerbated by his candidacy.  How do you ignore that?  I think that the answer is a national recognition of the concepts from the Brunk quote above and a commitment from people of conscience to continual national improvement in regard to these issues.  What does that mean in practice?  It means that we purposely move the national discussion past the bigots.  We have to start discussing the ways we can improve the country and the world and stop engaging their sickness.  Engaging them makes them stronger.  They have no intention of stopping their bigotry.  "Oh!  I'm a racist!  I never knew.  I'll stop now." Right.  That's not going to happen.  And if you've engaged enough bigots you know that's true.  If we ignore them long enough, they'll have no platform for their sickness.  So, we move past them and we work together to make this a better place.

That does leave another problem though.  That problem is the need to constantly remind the oppressed that we are ignoring the bigots, not because we're okay with what they're saying, but because we don't want to engage their sickness.  I think if this were made explicit somehow, perhaps the president could speak about it, and it could become part of our collective consciousness, then we might be all right.  Good people everywhere could just ignore the bigots and look for solutions to our problems.  

I know it sounds pie-in-the-sky, but engaging bigots only results in more bigotry.  The Trump candidacy makes that clear.  Let's make America great by leaving them behind.