Over this past weekend, my wife and I were invited to meet some old friends for dinner. When I say “old friends,” I mean people we have known and been close to for over forty years. We have watched each other’s children grow up, celebrating birthdays, graduations, weddings, and grieving together at funerals. There was nothing extraordinary about this invitation, we’ve done this literally hundreds of times. But that’s all over now. As I explained to my wife, they are dead to me now.
See, he had fairly successful small construction business and retired a few years ago due to an accident which left him with some serious physical problems. Through his extensive rehab, he found himself with a lot of time on his hands. Out of boredom, he turned to the Internet and quickly became a hardcore Facebook addict who spent long hours propagating Alt-Right propaganda. He became obsessed with Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, and was convinced that they were coming for his guns. That was his single big issue. His wife likely went along to get along. Both voted for Trump. Both are dead to me now.
My wife’s oldest sister married her husband right out of high school. He was the top jock at their high school and she was the pretty cheerleader who was always on his arm. After they got married, he settled into being a lifelong alcoholic, and she hung with him the whole time. They were always the life of the party while he continued to lose one good job after another until about thirty years ago, he was stricken with a massive heart attack which left his heart so damaged as to completely debilitate him and prevent him from doing anything, except drink. He soon filed for Social Security disability and she worked clerical and secretarial jobs to make ends meet until she became eligible to file for retirement benefits about ten years ago. Both became Fox News addicts and she eventually took to Facebook where she regularly posted anti-Obama and later, anti-Hillary screeds. People started dreading family events because they would inevitably get in their cups and preach against the “liberal elite.” Oddly, illegal immigration was their pet issue. How could all those illegal immigrants suck at the tit of the American government! Apparently, that was their job! Both voted for Trump. Both are dead to me now.
I could go on with more examples of people I know, who allowed themselves to be whipped up into such passion over single issues that at best, affected them only in the most marginal sense, but more likely not at all, and were willing to vote against their own self-interests, and the common good. But there was something else to it. It was the cavalier manner in which they did it – as though they were taking out the trash. They allowed themselves to become filled with hate. In the cases above, I suspect that it was a way of rationalizing their own failures and placing blame on someone else. It couldn’t have been a series of bad decisions, or an accident of fate that caused their hardship. There had to be a villain and that villain had a name: Hillary. I don’t doubt their pain, which was real. But they allowed themselves to become so caught up in their fantasies that they were willing to sell the rest of us down the river in order to rationalize their circumstances. There are so many people I know who I believe voted for Trump as a way to soothe their tender egos. In the process, they have sentenced us all to the bizarre, dangerous future we must now endure. That I do not forgive. They are all dead to me now.
Most of the people I know who voted for Trump were single issue voters. And the issue mostly boiled down to “not Hillary.” I think we will see plenty of buyer’s remorse when it dawns on them that they bought the whole Trump package: racism and revenge, greed, ineptitude and cruelty. As I told my wife on election night, going forward I have only one rule: Those Trump voters do not get to complain, at least not to me. Not ever. I don’t care if it’s friends or family, or what kind of gathering we are at. Every time one of them complains to me about Trump, they will be told in no uncertain terms to shut the fuck up, that they had the opportunity to support the candidate who was best educated, most experienced, and best prepared to represent and be a voice for them. Instead, they picked the ShamWow guy. They are all, every last one of them, dead to me now.
