It’s a beautiful night in Takoma Park as Kristen and I rattle our way over patches and peeling bridges and wend our way across potholed roads. It’s another sudden edge-of-freeze tonight and you can just see the plants withering and the roads groaning a asphalt contracts, forcing further cracks and ripples, wrinkles in the surface that seem like nothing at 10mph and seem like purposeful vehicle caltrops at 30. I’m mourning our survival as a species even as a shiver deliciously in the cold and the sky has that curious deep blue-grey that promises sun set and storm.
I don’t want to think about politics right now. I don’t want to talk about it. I hate the level of confrontation required to have a conversation about it and yet if you don’t converse you just sit on opposite sides of the line KNOWING the other person’s dead, dead wrong. Just like I KNOW that people who support Trump are dead wrong. As we drive through the culturally diverse neighbourhoods north of Washington DC, flashing from Hispanic Langley Park into very white Silver Spring, departing from historically black DC and leaving formerly artsy / poor but currently aging rich hippie Takoma Park – it’s hard to comprehend the fear and hatred boiling that man to the top of his party. I’ve tried to have the conversation – and no-one who I know who supports him seems to be able to give me policy reasonings. A friend likes him because he’s the most “punk rock” of politicians. There’s plenty who argue that someone who has so much money must be GOOD with money. A couple of family members make no bones about the idea that they support him because he’ll finally “solve the problem with the Mexicans / Saudis / Muslims / [brown people]” – but I don’t know anyone that I count in my circle of friends who will blatantly point to the racial / religious side of Trump’s trumpeting…
Like I said, I don’t want to think about it, much less write about it – I CERTAINLY don’t want to TALK about it – and yet I’m terrified that this horror is heading towards political office. And I want to understand why and how because I viscerally HATE the idea that so much of America has fallen to xenophobic panic. I hate the idea that Americans can be so selfish, short-sighted, unempathetic and rabid. For as much as I do tend to have a level of contempt for the masses, I always KNEW I was being elitist and that there was a lot to Love at every level of socie – no… no apparently there isn’t.
No, I don’t understand it at all.
And so it’s a beautiful night and I’m headed home. And every night I can’t sleep because I keep thinking “isn’t there some point, some argument, some THING I can say” that’ll wedge some doubt into these made up minds, because I don’t see how these people can be SO frightened and so foolish. People in America don’t know how good they’ve got it and don’t understand how much good can be done – and they’re willing to give the keys of the most powerful nation in the world over to an obscene, spoiled misogynist because they’ve been told to be afraid of their neighbour.
So please – someone point me to a policy paper, a logical course of action – some semblance of factual reasoning that makes Trump seem like a logical choice so I can at least respect his supporters if not their choices. I WANT to believe that 10 million people are not simply motivated by dripping hatred and blind terror. I want to believe we’re better than that.
