We are better than this
User magicpiano on Wikipedia
NOTE: Per a conversation with a Catholic sister in New Hampshire who sometimes teaches Helytimes posts to her advanced English class, I’ve xx’d out one of the words originally in this piece. I feel bad about using it when I remembered about the advanced English class at the progressive Catholic school in New Hampshire. Though I bet some of the students have heard worse words.
The goal here should be to raise the discourse.
It feels so clear to me that the President, Donald Trump is a dumb xxxxxxxx, and it causes me a lot of agony. The more I learn about him the more I’m convinced of it.
62,418,820 Americans voted for him. All those people are not dumb xxxxxxxx. Confident I could find some common ground with almost of any of them.
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Mad coastal elite and therefore confused by what was happening, I did my best to understand Trump voters. I went to a Trump rally and to the RNC with a press pass and talked to many Trump supporter.
I notice a weird and semi-macho kind of act among non-Trump types as to who is listening the hardest to Trump voters. I don’t want to front in that game, I just want to offer my own ideas about how non-dumb xxxxxxs could’ve elected a dumb xxxxxxxx.
My impression was that Trump supporters either
1) felt Hillary Clinton was an evil xxxxxxxx
2) knew Trump was a dumb shithead but felt he would benefit their core beliefs or their money and business interests or
3) were frothingly angry about politics in general and wanted to throw a brick through the window of the system / send a message that would express their revulsion and disgust
4) combo
1 and 3 were the ones I could most easily comprehend and engage with.
I do not think any of the Trump supporters I spoke with thought of themselves as racists. To suggest they were racist would end conversation immediately and unpleasantly. To them any suggestion of racism was an absurd charge and a cheap trick and a nasty weapon.
Like everybody else, they had come up with contradictory and complex ideas that allowed them to live with the facts that
1) white people brought black people to the USA as slaves, profited off them, then attempted to keep them down through every trick possible including brutal violence
2) all the founders and wild disproportionately everybody with money and power since in the United States including every single president – except the last one, who the current president kept trying to suggest was born in Africa – was a white man
Racial fear and racial identity, the underlying belief that America should be white and Christian and everybody else is fine as long as they get with that program was absolutely present and common in the Trump voters I spoke to. What is the best counter-argument to that other than presenting counter-examples, and discussing cases like Los Angeles where diversity of national origin isn’t really a problem, in fact is a strength?
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Paul Bartunek for LA Weekly “10 Best Taco Trucks In LA“
Some of the Trump voters I talked to said things which were demonstrably false or misinformed or off-balance with regard to race and religion and the world.
I would say many of the Trump voters I met were not 100% convinced of the idea that women could be as good at being in charge as men. A word for what they felt could be misogyny. But that word does not seem useful to me. It shuts down hope for further conversation and convincement when the truth is misogyny like autism is a spectrum and many of these people could easily be convinced to vote for a woman.
Most of these people will come to discover that Trump was a huge mistake.
When somebody makes a huge mistake it’s common to be angry at them.
Good decisions rarely emerge from anger. Trump at age 70 either hasn’t learned this or doesn’t have the discipline to correct it in himself.
That’s one of many reasons why he should’ve never gotten anywhere close to the Oval Office. I’m not sure he should’ve been allowed on like a tour, let alone as president.
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Many bad people in my experience end up with exactly the punishment they deserve
This is a mess and a shame. It will take a very long time to trust again a country where a xxxxxxxx as dumb and crooked and gnarly as Donald Trump got elected president.
Part of our job as citizens for the rest of our lives will be undoing this disgrace and bringing some honor back to this country, which has done much that’s staggeringly, tears to your eyes amazing and heroic and noble.
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photo of John Young by Charlie Duke
This sucks, because I’m very lazy and have other things I’d rather do and preferred when my civic responsibility was minimal.
The first job is to defeat politicians who see Trump as anything other than a dumb xxxxxxxx / cheap gangster who must be contained in every legal way. Defeat of politicians is the only message politicians really receive. Victory for any politician who shows Trump to be the fool he is.
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Counterpoint from Rabih Alameddine about whether we are better than this or not. Sticking by it.
