O P I N I O N
NOT THAT PROFOUND
By Nathan Graziano
For those of you who read this column, you know that I’ve been abundantly blunt with my thoughts and opinions about President-elect Donald Trump.
For those of you who read this column and support Trump and the MAGA movement in America, I’m guessing that you’re enjoying your fat slice of schadenfreude right now watching people, like me, lick their wounds.
And for those other people, like me, who detest Trump’s behavior and the fact that he has now seemingly been exonerated for his long list of crimes and his abhorrent treatment of other human beings, you are likely still in the early stages of grieving, trying to make sense of this seismic shake-up in our known world.
In my own attempt to make sense of this, I went for a long walk in the woods—maybe channeling my inner-Wordsworth—the day after the election. For some reason, the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s “Independence Day”—from his 1980 album “The River”—kept playing in my head.
The song is about a son reckoning with the death of his father, and the fact that the two men never really got along. The second verse starts with the lyrics: “‘Cause the darkness in this house has got the best of us/There’s a darkness in this town that’s got us, too.”
Maybe it was the song’s grief that caught me, but the more I thought about it, and the more I walked, the more I realized it was that “darkness” that was concerning me.
I’m not going to bitch about the election or the results. It was a fair election, and a majority of Americans spoke loudly, vehemently, in favor of electing Donald Trump to another four years in the Oval Office.
Trump won, fair and square.
But that “darkness”—an ugliness that has always existed in the United States, but had been somewhat masked since the Civil Rights Act in 1964—had reared its face for the world to see clearly now. While the darkness and ugliness has existed since the Founding Fathers—who were slave owners with a generally low estimation of women and the working class—the civil rights and women’s rights movements of the 1906s hid this for awhile with a mask of progressive agendas.
On Tuesday, a majority of Americans decided that they would rather have a man convicted of sexual assaults against women, an unrepentant felon and a narcissist, lead this country as opposed to a smart black woman. They chose vengeance, vitriol and hatred over hope and forgiveness. They gave a middle finger to the concepts of moral character and critical thinking, and said, “We want this guy instead.”
And this is exactly who we’re going to get.
I understand that a lot of people will say they voted for him based on the economy, on Biden’s failure on immigration, or simply on the fact that they’re sick of listening to these out-of-touch highly-educated liberal elites telling them what to think and believe.
But I don’t buy that.
In order to vote for a person like Donald J. Trump, you needed to reconcile with the ugliness in this nation’s past and our present. Either that, or you needed a master’s degree in cognitive dissonance.
If you voted for Trump, undoubtedly you listened to the terrible things this man has said about women, about people of color, about people who identify differently than you, and you reconciled his bigotry with your own beliefs.
Or you agree with him.
Either way, you’re complicit with a platform that embraces hate and bitterness and violence, a platform that has always existed in this country, but we tried to bury it—and the Democratic National Committee is every bit as guilty—with a face that pretended to care about people and equality.
Not anymore. This is, once again, the face of America.
But those of us who dissent can’t crawl into a corner and curl into a fetal position. We must punch back. We must punch back at the face of hate—while we still can—by embracing decency and civility and thoughtfulness as our new face moving forward.
In other words, we need to become Donald J. Trump’s antithesis.
You can reach Nate Graziano at ngrazio5@yahoo.com