Sunday, November 13, 2016

No compromise with Trump's hatred

Since the election, liberals have been told we need to "empathize" with Trump voters, to "come together" and show "unity" with Donald and his supporters, to "give him a chance", or even to "stop whining".

Well, no. I'm not going to "show unity" with a small-minded person who denigrates women and minorities, threatens to deport immigrants (my wife is an immigrant, like Donald's) and wonders why we can't use nuclear weapons against our enemies. I'm not going "stop whining" about a guy who just hired a white supremacist as his chief strategist. I'm not going to "give a chance" to someone who's 2 *million* behind in the vote count, and falling further behind every day. In a democracy, the person with the most votes wins. In any other democratic country, if the person who came in second was installed as president, it'd be called a coup d'etat.

Similarly, I'm not going to empathize with anyone who voted for him. I'm not going to try to "understand" someone who writes graffiti like this:


Or carries a confederate flag to a veteran's day parade:


Or wishes Michelle Obama had been "assassinated":



I have no interest whatsoever in learning more about these people. Hillary Clinton's description of them as a "basket of deplorables" was absolutely correct. And the fact that these idiots' votes count four times more than mine is why we're stuck with a President Trump.

This is not a mentality you reason or empathize with. This is a mentality you fight until it is destroyed. Acquiescence in this case amounts to appeasement. I am not *ever* going to tolerate behavior like this, or the acceptance of it from others. If you voted for this jerk, then you absolutely deserve to feel uncomfortable by protests and "whining" for the next four years. Frankly, you're getting off easy. You're paying a very small price for voting in favor of overt racism and misogyny.

But the rest of us need to keep fighting, not just for liberal values ("liberal values" like, ya know, respecting other nationalities, races and sexes besides your own) but for democracy in general. The huge and actually underreported protests we're seeing now probably aren't going to unseat an illegitimate president who was installed against the people's will. But what they can do is start a movement to abolish the ridiculous electoral college that gives rural voters outsize influence. No American's vote should count more than any other's.

Not my photo, but this was an anti-Trump protest in LA November 12th. This is more than a few thousand people, folks.

In the meantime, I will never recognize Donald as president of anything. He has no moral authority, and was not elected by the people. The people spoke, and we elected Clinton. Every action Trump takes should be recognized for what it is - an undemocratic, authoritarian power grab. As such, he should be resisted at every turn. No law he proposes, no court or other appointment should make it onto the floor of congress.

It's going to be an uphill battle because the rural vote holds more sway than the much much larger city centers in this country. But we should all be writing to our senators and congresspeople telling them not to recognize any non-existent "mandate" by this presidency, and to oppose everything it does. No compromises. No appeasement. No "coming together" with hatred. We should show even less respect to this president than his supporters showed Obama. Whatever you think of Obama's policies, the people voted him into office - twice. Not so with Trump. I will show him no more respect than any other private citizen who also happens to be a racist and admitted sexual predator.

In the future, people will be asking what you did to stand up against this regime, and those that put it there. What will you tell them?

About This Blog

This is increasingly not a blog about Alphabet City, New York. I used to live in the East Village and work on Avenue B, but I no longer do. Why don't I change the name if I'm writing about Japan and video games and guitars? Because New Yorkers are well-rounded people with varied interests, and mine have gone increasingly off the rails over the years. And I don't feel like changing the name. I do still write about New York City sometimes.

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