“Trump is for Winners.” That was the name of a letter to the editor that Tara Trower Doolittle of the Austin American-Statesman described in a recent column. It seems someone in Snyder in West Texas sent in a letter telling why Donald Trump is the right man for America. It was the saddest thing I’ve read today — the saddest thing I’ve read in a long time. Doolittle quotes the letter:
“People who hate America and our God want to run this country, or ruin it, just because they didn’t learn the lesson every American should have learned. I’ll tell you how I learned it.
When I was a kid, seventh grade. This other kid wet his pants in class. I remember this so clearly. For just a second, I felt horrible for this kid, I wanted to hide him or make the pee invisible or something. But then almost everyone else – the cool kids especially — started laughing at him and saying, over and over, “Loser, loser!!!” Some of the guys went over and whacked him in the back of the head when the teacher wasn’t looking. But it was when the cool girls started teasing this loser that he just lost it, started sobbing, ran out of the room. And by then I was laughing right along with everyone else. I realized — this is my point — that it is easier and better to go along with the crowd when the crowd is right, and the crowd is right if the person they’re picking on runs away. That proves it! That is how I know, to this day, what is right to do. Strength proves itself. It proves itself by being easy to spot, and by clobbering weak people. I do not want to be a weak person. I do not want America to be weak.”
That’s what we’re up against: a moral emptiness that doesn’t just tolerate cruelty but celebrates it; a need to be a “winner” so desperate that it latches onto a blustering bully like Donald Trump and calls him a hero; a fear of being “weak” so all-consuming that it turns its self-doubt and self-hatred on the most vulnerable available target.
It makes me sad that such people are out there. It makes me mad that Donald Trump channels their ills into his political aggrandizement. And it all makes me work that much harder to defeat him and elect Hillary Clinton.