According to a recent story at Racked, Make America Great Again hats have become the hot new souvenir for (white) middle-schoolers visiting Washington, D.C.
The hats, and fidget spinners (if you don’t know what those are, you should be ok with that), are anecdotally the “two most popular items” at DC souvenir shops, which has led to “roving packs of red-hat-wearing teens — mostly male and almost all white — from the Lincoln Memorial to the Library of Congress,” which basically sounds like the worst Children of the Corn sequel ever.
While some interviewed in the story dismissed the trend as youthful pack-mentality and age-appropriate posturing, for others, it doesn’t feel quite so innocuous. After a recent field trip, one Illinois-based Muslim-American mother told Racked, ”Our school district has a good amount of minorities in it, but we were all stunned. Every single white kid besides maybe one or two walked off the bus with a red hat on.”
“For such a seemingly small accessory,” the story said, “it’s freighted, for many, with the emotional impact of the president’s entire campaign and term so far: every comment he’s made about Mexicans, women, or immigrants, the Muslim ban, the threats against bodily autonomy and affordable health care.”
So here’s a message to the children (who are our future): Buy a Slytherin t-shirt. Cheer for Ultron. Discover The Marshall Mathers LP. Do normal contrarian kid things, but stay in your depth. The last thing anyone needs in this tinderbox of a political climate are kids passively endorsing divisive ideologies that they don’t understand.
Plus, you’ll hate those MAGA hat photos in five years (think JNCOs, but if wearing JNCOs meant you also were super hyped on the haphazard destruction of 250 years of hard-earned civil liberties and compromise).
You can read more about it at Racked.
