Oh no! Not another journalistic touchy-feelie session with the struggles of the poor, misunderstood Trump voter today in America!
Yes it is, but this one is really kind of tragic, and worth reading.
Miranda’s rebellion: The reckonings of one of the South’s white suburban women, whose loyalty is key to whether Trump is reelected
The woman in the story is economically comfortable, but someone who's beginning to question the underpinnings of that part of Southern culture that takes Trump to its heart: the racism, the evangelical hypocrisy, the sexism, the bigotry, the misogyny.
It's a wrenching journey, with few guideposts for those who are on it, and little in the way of encouragement other than being good with your own conscience.
The journalist skilfully lays out the ways this particular woman is trapped into keeping quiet about all the things that are starting to bother her.
The social pressures are enormous to just go along with it all, don't rock the boat.
Especially if you think you're the only one in the whole social ocean around you that's having the kind of doubts you are.
Her life has become basically a lie, at least of omission, in terms of what's she's even willing to talk about with her own husband.
Things Miranda had never told Phillip:
That she thought Trump was racist, and when he questioned the legitimacy of the first black president, she thought about her black students and how wrong it was to rob them of pride.
That she thought Trump was cruel, and when he mocked a reporter with disabilities, she felt the same surge of blind rage she had once felt when a boy called her sister a “retard.”
She thought Trump was immoral, and when she heard Christians defending him, she wanted to say, “How? How do we worship the same God? There are so many things that we as human beings should not condone, should not excuse.”
She had told Phillip about being sexually assaulted by a man when she was 8 years old, but she had not told him that when she heard Trump boasting about how he could kiss women “without even asking” and “grab them by the p---y,” he had reminded her of the man who had grabbed her when she was walking to school, and the feeling of hands forcing themselves on her, and the feeling of struggling to break free, and the feeling of running for her life, and of “exactly that fear, that helplessness,” and that when Trump got elected, she felt none of that mattering.
She had not told Phillip that when she saw Trump smiling on a screen in her living room, she felt physically ill. That she found him “revolting” and “vulgar.” That Trump was the opposite of everything she had always believed her husband to be: decent, honorable, Christian, the sort of man who would find Trump offensive.
She had not told Phillip what she wanted from him: “I want to hear him say, ‘The way he talks about women is not okay. The way he talks, period, is not okay.’ ”
She had not told him what she wanted to say to him and all Southern men who believed in some chivalrous ideal: “I need you to stand up for me.”
She had not told him any of those things because she was afraid to hear what he might say back, and what that might reveal...
Of course, a long-form article laying it all out in a major national newspaper will have put an end to that.
Maybe her courage in confronting the truth, even if it will upset her nice comfortable life and marriage, will have an effect on others around her, telling them, You're not the only one.
As for the rest of those Southern women who are starting to look at themselves and their lives honestly, even if they don't have the courage to come out and confront those around them openly, maybe at least a critical mass of them will act on their consciences in the privacy of the voting booth when they have the opportunity come November.