I grew up poor in a middle class neighborhood. We didn't have a car or a phone. Phones in those days were big clunky things. I remember one used to sit on a table in the living room. It had been disconnected because my single-mother couldn't pay the bill. She was a waitress at a soda fountain.
My father was a bigot, well they both were, but I remember not speaking to him for basically the rest of my life after he told me he went to see boxing to "see the nigger get beat."
They were working class. Probably would have been Trump supporters.
I have no respect for Trump supporters. I know I'm supposed to. It's politically correct to. But I don't. They've destroyed America. Will we ever recover from Trump? Most likely a worse Trump will come along, less crazy, less stupid, more like Putin. They'll welcome him because he talks a good game.
The working class, people like my parents, made it happen. I'm supposed to be politically correct and admire them for their....what? Really. What? Ignorance? Stupidity? Lack of character judgment? Admiration for a con man?
If they couldn't see he was a fraud, what are we to make of them? I don't excuse them. I condemn them. If they get all their information from Fox News? What of that? When I wrote for a supermarket tabloid, I always laughed and thought, "There are a lot of really stupid people out there who will believe "Mother Gets Pregnant, Has Baby Same Day."
I yucked it up. The stories read as any normal newspaper story. "It's exactly like wrestling," I told myself. A couple of decades later Roger Ailes took that concept, walked it back a little (not much), started Fox News and the suckers bought it, ate it up, allowed Roger Ailes to fuck them.
"Oh there's anger and disappointment in the country," we heard. Good enough. And the manner of addressing this is to elect Trump? I'm not going to go into his mania, if you have half a functioning brain you already know.
So these "morons" (thank you Mr. Secretary for making ok to say that again) got fooled, bamboozled. And we're to revere them because of some love we have been told we should have for the working class.
Fuck them. I'm one of them. I've never had a penny to my name. I live in fear every day that the rent will be raised, the car will break down...or any other emergency that is destined to fuck up my life.
So don't feel sorry for them. They could have made other choices, but they didn't. They chose wrong. The were gullible. They're like the little old lady who used to bang her shoe on the edge of the wring during wrestling. Like it did something. Always expecting something to happen. Nothing ever did.
Now something is.
Disaster. Thanks mom and dad.
I hear you! I, too, grew up in a working class community, salt of the earth, rust belt factory people, union jobs. Black people were not allowed in by many of those unions, unless they wanted to sweep metal filings off the floor, until after the Civil Rights movement. And when the factories went away, the men started hanging out in bars, drinking beer, whining, and beating their wives in the evening. I teach people of color, mostly, and they work their butts off at jobs, then they go to school from 6 to 10 p.m. to make lives better for their children. More than one of them came to this country in a leaky boat, risking their lives. I respect that. They will do what it takes to make life better. They don't complain. They don't make excuses. It's the white guys drinking beer who are good at that.
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DeleteI feel exactly the way you do. The first time I ever heard the "N" word was from my brother and father as we watched some variety show in the 70s. They made fun of Gladys Knight and the Pips and it broke my heart because I loved her. I was 5. I began to cry. I will never know how these trump supporters let hate rule their hearts like this. I think they're ridiculous for voting against their own best interests. I also hate Democrats for losing the working class. How did THAT happen? The greed and hunger for power is rampant and its killing our country. trump is the obvious result of years and years of bullshit in media.. That same brother who said the "n" word is now a double republican who voted for trump despite growing up in a Ukrainian American community where we were raised to mistrust Russia, the country who has always tried to kill Ukraine's culture and take everything it has. His brain has been addled by non-stop Fox News. I'll never forget when we brought home his two tiny twins that his now ex-wife gave birth to -- babies were born premature so it was a very big deal when I helped bring them home. We set down their little carriers on the floor directly below a gigantic television playing Fox News. That channel never got shut off. Now those twins are 17 and were wearing trump tee-shirts during election season last year. This is an abysmal chapter in history. It's horrible. Thanks for expressing it so perfectly Tom.
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