My Fellow Americans

How are you doing? How are we doing? 

Personally, I don’t know whether to cry or throw up. Or both. 

I have refrained from saying the most acerbic things about the U.S. electorate over the past however many years I’ve been saying them.

I refrained because I want to see the best in people. I refrained because I can’t relate to how fearful and dark your view of the world has to be to support a man so grossly inadequate, petty, and small masquerading as a tough guy or even more laughable, an intelligent one.

I refrained because I tend to operate from a space of hope and caring. I tend to care about and for the marginalized, the oppressed, the Other. We have all, at some point, been bullied, threatened, subject to anger, if not hatred. Many of us more than others. The positive outcome can be greater empathy, sympathy, and a desire to understand the person who bullies, threatens, hates.

The positive outcome is not giving into, much less returning bullying, threat, and hatred with more of the same.

I still don’t want to do that. I don’t want to say that most of the people who voted for Trump are racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, hatemongers driven by their own constellations of hatred and fear. I don’t want to, but that seems to be the case. I live still in one of the reddest states in what is now a blood red United States (more than ever) and I don’t know how I’m going to feel okay about voicing an opinion in public. I can coast on passing as an old, presumably straight, white guy. Hell, if I wore a MAGA cap, I’d probably be invited to the club.

But I don’t like the idea that many or most of my neighbors would love to see me locked up, or who knows, in their world, deported or consigned to a concentration camp. I don’t like thinking that there a many or most of the population who would likely not care about my immigrant, LGBTQ+ friends , and frankly, anyone who makes them uncomfortable, eradicated. Not just shoved back in the closet (remember the days of “oh, I don’t care if they’re gay just as long as they don’t shove it in my face”?), but eradicated (many of you are too young to remember things like ”The Only Good [racist epithet] is a Dead One” on t-shirts). 

I’m not saying that’s what “all Trump voters” feel, but I really don’t give a fuck what they feel. They voted for a doddering felon supported by billionaires and corruption on a scale that dwarfs my puny brain’s ability to think because THEY AGREED WITH HIS PLATFORM IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER TO ONE DEGREE OR ANOTHER.

They voted to withdraw support from our allies, to deregulate polluters and walk away from even the pretense to give a shit about the environment or the world in which they live. They voted for hatred and bigotry, often masquerading as some perverse “Christian” love. Fuck these people. I’m not refraining.

Do I hate them? No, but I can hold them in the deepest contempt I can muster. Do I want them jailed? No, their jails are their already closed minds and contracted hearts. Do I want them punished? Don’t need to. When their daughters are pregnant from rape or incest and they can’t get an abortion, or when their water is so tainted by polluted aquifers and groundwater or their insurance (ha-ha-ha, like they’ll have insurance when the ACA is repealed) denies them assistance for their asthma medication because they can’t breathe the air, or their kids can’t get into any decent college because tuition has sky-rocketed again or because public school funding has been substantially reduced and the curricula reduced with it, and when they look one another in the eye and wonder if that guy can be trusted because he might be a commie-pinko-queer, then no outside force needs to punish them. Their hatred, suspicion, and fear are their own prisons.

Unfortunately, the rest of us are going to pay for it.