Dealing With It

I am still trying to deal with what we did. I am still trying to come to grips with what just happened and trying to get past the terror of what may come next. Every day I am getting a little better, at least until some of the worst things that may come happen anyway. There have been a ton of editorials of what happened, and what Trump did right, what the Democrats did wrong, and how the issues of Trump voters should have been addressed and not dismissed. I don’t want to write about any of that, partly because it has been done, and even more because everything I read is either trying to rationalize everything or make it fit their worldview. What I want to write about is how this moment has possibly forever altered me and how I see my fellow countrymen. Because for me this feels like a watershed moment, at least on a personal level.

Going into Tuesday, polls showed Trump with a 15-20% chance of winning, we know now that these polls were wrong. Or if not wrong that the polls had overestimated the number of democrats that were going to vote, or that said they were going to vote. The funny thing is deep down I never really believed the polls and I suspect that most of my liberal brethren didn’t either, but we were wrong about them the exact opposite way than they turned out. I felt confident that there were people being polled that said they were voting for Trump because they were registered Republicans and that is what they were supposed to say, but as soon as they were staring at their ballot they would vote for Gary Johnson, or hold their nose and vote for Hillary. I just naively believed that many people, maybe even most people were good people, that morally they couldn’t bring themselves to endorse and vote for such a reprehensible monster. Clearly I was wrong, and I am still trying to figure out how to move forward with that knowledge.

I feel like Roddy Piper in They Live; that is most accurate metaphor I have come up with. If you are not familiar with that movie it is an 80’s cult classic where Roddy Piper comes across some sunglasses and when he puts them on he can see aliens among us, they look just like us to everyone else, but these glasses allows him to see them for what they are. This election has been those glasses for me and I see people differently now. I go for walks at lunch and I pass people all the time and I saw them as pleasant folks, people who probably were good people with interesting lives. Now I see them differently, I walk past a woman and think she probably wants all the Latinos that don’t always speak English out of her country. I walk past a man who is probably pissed that a black man got promoted over him at work, another one that is mad that his boss is woman and thinks she needs to get back in the kitchen. I keep walking and wondering just how many of the people I am passing believe in a Jewish controlled media? How many of them want to bring back Jim Crow laws? How many of them want to roll back marriage equality and force gays back into the closet, or maybe in a prison cell? How many are deeply angry that they no longer live in an all-white neighborhood? How many of them would like to use or condone physical violence against a transgender person just for living openly? Right up until November 8^th I would have thought the answer to most of these questions was none or almost none. Now the results of this election tell me that it is almost half of them.

In 2012 I just assumed me and the average Romney voter had a difference of opinion, the same for the McCain voter in 2008, and the Bush voter before that. But with Trump it is different, almost the only actual positions that he took was that we should ban Muslims, kick out the Mexicans and keep them out with a wall, and that if your important enough you can get away with doing whatever you want to a woman. Sure I guess there is Obamacare too, he said he didn’t like that, which is almost the only position he took this election that wasn’t misogynist, xenophobic, or racist. So even if a person was voting for Trump because they don’t like Obamacare, or because he is an outsider that will shake up the establishment, that had to do it at the very least not being bothered by his racism, xenophobia, or misogyny. That just doesn’t make sense to me, let’s go back to 2012, if Obama had said that he believed Jews started all the wars and secretly ran the world and we need to bar any Jews from entering America and start a registry for any that are here, I would have voted for Romney or a third party candidate in a second. The only conclusion then is that people didn’t vote for Trump in spite of his evilness, they voted for him because of it.

So how do I move forward, I am going to do my best to find the silver lining here. Maybe this is the case of it always being the darkest before the light. I have said before that I thought Donald Trump’s candidacy represented the last gasp of good old American racism. That the old guard is dying out and the future belongs to open minded progressive youth, I still think that is true, it is just this last gasp was stronger than I thought and will probably push us back quite a bit. Maybe Trump voters aren’t the enemy maybe it is just the advances in medical science that has allowed them to live longer and cast their bigoted votes. So my hope for the future is the same as every parent, it is in my children. Two of my boys didn’t really pay much attention, but my Weebie and my daughter were shocked and devastated by what just happened and I have heard of a lot kids that feel the same way, they wonder what is going to happen to their gay friends, their transgender friends, their black friends, their Hispanic friends, and their Muslim friends, this is very personal to them. And the next election my daughter will be a voter, and she won’t be on the sideline, she will be exercising her right, because I am sure this administration is going to do their best to marginalize minorities and underprivileged and all they will really manage to do in the long run is invigorate them. We have been blindsided and dealt a devastating blow by the bullies, the bigots, the racists, the xenophobes, the misgonists, and the stupid, but they have not won the war, and they can never win the war, I truly belive that love always beats hate in the long run. The people that are the majority right now scare me, but the future should scare them because they have to know their hateful way of life can’t continue. We will get stronger and we will take back our country in the name of love, compassion, and empathy. So maybe I should thank Trump in the end for uniting us.