A Gold Star for Trump’s “Sacrifices”

“You have sacrificed nothing and no one,” said Khizr Kahn, a Muslim-American, at the Democratic National Convention in response to Trump’s hateful comments during his speech.

Trump tweeted this after blatantly criticizing Muslims in his speech at a rally. It’s strangely funny to me that a man like this has the balls to run for president. He lumps everyone into categories and indiscriminately attacks anyone who is in his way.

He speaks of sacrifice and yet he has done nothing in the the way of giving himself for other people.

He thinks of sacrifice as creating “thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs” on top of building “great structures.” He thinks that his “tremendous success” is the equivalent of sacrifice. What he speaks of is the minuscule charity work that comes with being rich and successful.

Trump’s one thing.

Then there are the Gold Star families. The meaning of the Gold Star isn’t universally understood because it isn’t often heard. Traditionally, soldiers would receive medals for their valor in battle: the Bronze Star, Silver Star, or the coveted Purple Heart. However, the Gold Star isn’t received by the soldiers themselves, but instead by the families of those who have lost their lives in battle. Thus, the family members of the fallen are called “gold star survivors.”

Khan’s family is a Gold Star family and their son, Captain Humayan Khan, died at the age of 27 after ordering everyone around him to take cover as he saw a taxi barrel through the gates of his base in Baquba, Iraq.

“His wife, if you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.”

These were Trump’s comments following the Khan’s reaction at the DNC. We have to understand that this is violence towards women and the his violence is male. From the looks of it, he makes the blatant assumption that because Khizr’s wife is a Muslim woman, she isn’t allowed to speak. Trump acts full of confidence because he knows that the law is on his side and he can say whatever he wants. He assumes that he has intelligence because of his “tremendous success.”

It’s “a legal system which ‘naturalizes’ violence against women in the home, by allowing perpetrators to act without fear of punishment by the state” and “a legal system devoted to maintaining control over women.” — Lucinda Joy Peach

Did Trump ever stop to think that maybe she couldn’t speak because she was too heartbroken from the ultimate sacrifice that she and her husband had made for this country? That’s on top of the fact that someone like Trump is running for and could quite possibly be the president of the country she’s living in.

“In the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: here for the first time person stepped up against person, here for the first time a person measured himself by another person.” — Friedrich Neitzche

When does someone ever get the right to measure himself to another person?

Never.

We are all human. So start acting like it Trump.

You can have your Purple Heart (which you don’t deserve), but until you start making bigger sacrifices and actually showing compassion, you’ll never get a Gold Star.