I’m entertaining some uncomfortable thoughts regarding hatred, and I want to offer them up to see what others think of them.
I am absolutely horrified by three statistics: 62 million Americans voted for Trump, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump,and 81 percent of evangelical Christians voted for Trump. These numbers have caused my hate gland to palpitate since November.
Of the three, the last one makes some sense since evangelicals believe so much nonsense in the first place. Why shouldn’t they believe God sent The Donald to save them? James Dobson believes Der Pumpkinfuehrer is born again. I guess that settles it. I don’t hate evangelicals, but I once took them seriously and regarded them as basically trying to be moral people. No more.
The other two numbers, though, trouble me. I don’t hate women of any color,but more than half seem to suffer some substantial degree of self-hatred. (How do you vote for a sexual predator without hating yourself?) Someone said white-identity trumps gender-identity, and I guess it’s true.
But the sixty-two million figure just won’t go away. Nor will the sixty-two million people it represents no matter what happens to the Trump presidency. As the months since he took office demonstrate,people who voted for him are profoundly ignorant. Did they not know that they were voting to dismantle the government? Do they really believe that's a good idea? Did they really believe that he was “one of them”?
I could go on with the rhetorical questions, but the point is Ihate these people. I have no respect for these gullible fools. I wishthey didn’t exist. The world would be better off without them.
You see where this has driven me. This attitude is not healthy. Some of those people undoubtedly lead decent lives and are well-meaning for the most part, but I can’t forgive them. And I won’t forgive anyone who voted for Trump unless they ask me to.
Here’s the problem. I grew up among these people. I thought like they did at one time. But I moved on, and they did not. I’m glad I’m different from them, but it’s a problem thinking I’m better than they are.
My mother’s family came to America from Italy on a boat in 1904. There were three kids on the boat and four more were born here. They had nothing but their determination to survive. Within a few years my mother’s father had a complete mental breakdown and spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. The kids went to work in their early teens, and only one graduated from high school.
My father’s father died in the flu epidemic after WWI leaving behind my father’s mother and five kids under 12. She would eventually marry a widower with children who treated them all like brothers and sisters. In spite of his stepfather’s insistence that the boys go to work in the factories, my father wanted to be a schoolteacher, and he eventually won out.
Being Italian immigrants in abject poverty, my mother’s siblings would have had a hard time finding people to look down on. They were at the bottom and they knew it, but they made their way. Their children, my cousins, prospered, went to college, and did just fine. The American dream eventually worked for them.
My father’s brothers and sisters had similar stories, as did my cousins on his side. But it was a time when opportunities were many in small mid-western towns. Those places are crumbling now, but people remember when life was good, more or less, and they want it to be good again. The trouble is it's an illusion. Life there sucked in the fifties unless you were a middle-class white male, and even then you were in a perpetual rat race to keep your head above water.
After college I tried living and working there, but I just couldn't cut it. I moved away and did well after escaping the narrowness of the small town. But when I went back to visit, I saw so much in people's lives I never want to repeat in mine.
Kurt Vonnegut said true terror is waking up and realizing your high school class is running the country. If Donald Trump had run for president of my high school class, that smug twit would have been laughed off of the stage. But I'm sure most of my classmates voted for him in November. They have grown either utterly credulous or stupid or both.
Most of them are not Klansman-racist. Most are “soft racist,” which has been described as people who disapprove of the lynching, but they'll sell you the rope.
I had told my son a year ago that Trump would not get enough votes to be a threat. I had hoped that the people I left behind were better than they turned out to be.
Here's the rub: to me Trump voters are white trash. Not redneck, not yokels, not hillbillies. White trash. It's a terrible term, pretty much equivalent to the N-word in terms of the fight you can get into by tossing it at someone. It is a harsh term. It conveys laziness, slovenliness, and indifference to anything which could improve one's lot in life.
The trouble is, I look down on those people in much the same way as they might look down on inner city black people. I judge them. I am prejudiced. I don't want to know more about them. I've given up on trying to bring them to my way of thinking.
Some talented writers have posted on this subject: David Adjakian here, Ian Douglas Rushlau here, and Forsetti's Justice elsewhere.
I know what they are saying – “engage with these people at their level,” but I am stuck with my frustrations. I can't afford to pay a shrink to sort it all out. I don't want to go around hating people, and I want to help with the resistance and recovery.
Where do I go from here?