It’s Come To This

I had a sad realization when I woke up this morning, summed up in the following little story:

About 40 years ago, I played poker with a friend’s relatives, who were relatively poor and uneducated but laudably honest, hard-working, good-willed and hilariously funny working class people back in Maryland.  For some reason, I was thinking specially of one they called Uncle Tommy who, when holding two nines and was dealt a six, shouted at the ceiling: “God, please hand me a monkey-wrench!”  I laughed heartily, and I felt a genuine affinity for the guy.

I now realize, and I’m deeply ashamed to admit it, that I would have such a level of disdain for Uncle Tommy if I were in that same place today, simply because he’d almost definitely be a Trump supporter, that I don’t think I could have enjoyed him or his humor at all.  We’ve reached a place in this country where the vast majority of Trump’s backers and his opponents carry around a deep resentment of each other, one that has destroyed a great deal of what made this country great: some level of kinship with our fellows.

This is a terrible blow to sustainability.  The only way humankind is going to deal with its many existential threats is a feeling that other people–all other people–have intrinsic value and merit our respect. The current American zeitgeist has taken us in precisely the opposite direction.

There are many things to hate about what the U.S. has become as a nation, but perhaps the most regrettable is that we’ve been turned against one another, purely for the purpose of getting one person, a horrible human being, elected President of the United States.

Maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake, and I know that this isn’t a new thought, but it really hit me in the gut this morning when I thought about Uncle Tommy.