(AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
It’s been a few weeks since my last post and, honestly, I’ve struggled as to what to do next; both personally as well as publicly in my attempts to join the Resistance against the president-elect.
Initially, I felt an overwhelming need to vent my frustration and anger at those voters who, defiant in their ignorance, chose a race-baiting narcissist to be our next president. Admittedly, I cast a very wide net in railing against many of them as bigots, sexists, and racists.
After that, I felt an overwhelming need to vent my anger directly toward the Cheeto-colored race-baiting narcissist, and his entire support staff of enablers. In fact, I’m still doing that as part of an ongoing presence on social media and IRT. (The resistance will not be silent!)
Even though doing these actions was satisfying in the short-term basis, they ultimately weren’t going to help in terms of truly coming to grips with the real question of how this travesty occurred. Nor would it help the greater question of figuring out how to prevent similar democratic lapses from happening in the future.
Though much has been made of “white, working-class angst”, it turns out that a myriad of factors played into the November horror show. Race, gender, class, economics, and Russian propagation of fake news against Clinton all had a hand in the outcome.
When you eliminate the extreme voting blocs (racist, die-hard sexists & rabid Clinton haters), what’s left is a core of voters – typically white – who view themselves as normal, average Americans. But I’m hard-pressed to believe that the “average” American would have made the choice to vote for all that he represented. That they would make the choice to accept widespread injury to others in exchange for a potentially small personal gain.
However, if that assumption is incorrect, I’d like to know why. To that end, I’ve realized that I need to have a brutally honest discussion with a Trump voter. This wouldn’t be a broad discussion of left versus right or Republican vs Democrat, because we know that these previously-important identities meant nothing to the typical Trump voter. It would just be focused on the “why” of their vote in spite of knowing that others might be harmed in doing so.
I promise that this won’t be an exercise in antagonism. I’m not here to solicit an online fight with anyone. And if it looks like it’s going down that path, I’ll end the interaction. I’m simply trying to find a way to understand and comprehend something which is incomprehensible to myself and many others.
If you are interested in doing this (or know anyone who might be open to this brutally honest level of sharing), please contact me via the form and we’ll go from there. At the end of the process, I’ll use our interaction as the basis for a subsequent post. For anyone with privacy concerns, absolutely no personal information from this interaction will be used in the piece.
If we all genuinely want to get beyond the current bitterness, it’s going to take a helluva lot of work. Let’s start the process now.