Pouring My Art Out

Trump famously said that he could shoot someone and not lose any votes. He is literally… and I literally hate using the word literally literally… at the point where this is now true.

See, I figured out why that is.

And it is really very simple.

The people who support Trump now are angry, small-minded, petty, bitter, malicious haters… (See, I didn’t call them deplorable)… They despise the democrats, sure, but they hate the ‘elites’ of their own party too. They hate anyone who is doing better than they they think they are doing. They hate anyone who is better educated, better adjusted, better dressed, better looking, or better off in any way than they perceive themselves to be. And for many, although I hesitate to call them out-and-out racists, they hate it most of all when people who are different from them in skin color or religious belief are ‘taking away’ what they think ought to be theirs.

And they don’t really care that they are, for the most part, better off than they were before Obama took office. Because facts don’t matter.They have convinced themselves that wanting to believe something is the same as actually believing it. Worse, they have convinced themselves that not wanting to believe something means they don’t have to believe it despite overwhelming evidence. Climate change is bad, so why take it as scientific fact? Evolution is embarrassing, so why admit it could be true? But they have no problem believing made up evidence, as long as it supports their conspiracy theories about how they are being robbed of what they think they ought to have.

Google the numbers of republicans who are convinced that if Trump looses the election that it is only going to be because of voter fraud or a rigged system that is out to deprive them of their dreams. Then Google the actual number of times voter fraud has even happened.

They have convinced themselves that crime is worse now, even though that isn’t true. They have convinced themselves that the country is worse off, even though jobs are up, the economy… which, I remind you, was destroyed by the last republicans in office… is recovering. Guns are good, foreigners are bad, America is no longer great… and it is all somebody else’s fault.

I think, deep down inside, they know all of this is true. They don’t really care that much about how great the country is. They care about how well it is doing for them. I think they know Trump would be a disaster for this country, not only here, but on an international scale. And it amazes me that they can so easily ignore the tenants of the very religion they are always touting and stand behind a man that so patently is against those very principles. They can’t actually tell us what horrible things would happen if Hillary is elected, because there isn’t anything to tell, other than the fact that, once again, cruel fate and a rigged system has robbed them of what they want.

They want to go back to when things were better… better for them… when ‘those people’ knew their place in society, when women and minorities weren’t out competing with them and taking away their dreams. The American dream isn’t failing. They want to pretend it is a nightmare so they can pass responsibility for their own failures and weaknesses off onto others.

Nothing we say or do will change any of that. These people never went away when we started expecting political correctness. They didn’t change their ideas or ideals, they just learned to stop saying them out loud. Now they don’t have to do that anymore.

Whatever happens in this election, these people aren’t going away. I hope that, like the dinosaur, they someday become extinct. I think we are moving in that direction. I hope we are. I hope someday, classrooms full of children of all colors and religions and sexual orientations will discuss… with their history teachers… what it was like in the old days, when people would try to make themselves feel better about who they were by trying to make other people seem like something less important.

But history happens. Time happens. Gay people and people from other cultures and backgrounds will make this great society even greater by their active participation. We will be made stronger by inclusion, by standing and working and loving together. We won’t be made stronger by an us-against-them mentality. We won’t lift ourselves higher by pushing other people down.

You do not make yourself better by telling yourself that you are better than someone else.

No matter how much you want to believe it.