A Post-Trump America
From Steve Schmidt, former campaign manager to John McCain and lifelong Republican:“No, Biden’s rallies weren’t bigger. No, you didn’t see many Biden flags on houses or Biden bumper stickers on cars. No, you don’t know a single person on your street or at your church who supports Biden. But guess what? We’re here.
Biden’s rallies were small because people who live in reality don’t want to expose themselves to the virus you continue to downplay or deny. We don’t fly Biden flags because we don’t want our houses burned down. We don’t put Biden bumper stickers on our cars because we want to avoid becoming targets for road rage. We don’t trust you. We’ve decided to minimize our interactions with people who cannot be reasoned with. This is for our own safety.
In private groups – where you’re not invited – we share our bewilderment of your descent into madness. We all have stories about how we’ve cut ties with you, our family and former friends, because we don’t want your hatred poisoning our social media streams. We can’t stand to listen to you vomiting the lies of your cult, day after day. You used to be different. We liked you. But now that we know what was inside your heart all along, we’ve decided you don’t deserve to know about our lives.
We’ll skip family reunions, even after we get the vaccine. We’ll make up some excuse just to be polite. But in reality, we just don’t feel like sitting around eating potato salad and making small talk with people who have such monstrous beliefs.
To all the brothers and aunts and cousins and dads and neighbors out there who just can’t wrap their heads around what this means going forward, know that these scars aren’t going away anytime soon. We won’t be reaching out, and we won’t be mending fences. It’s not up to us to apologize for the wounds you have gleefully inflicted upon us and our friends. You poured the gasoline, you lit the match. You burned this to the ground.
So if we seem different from now on, I guess we are, in a way. We’ve seen your truth laid bare, and we’re horrified.
I hope Trump was worth it.”
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Wow, that’s powerful writing. What a gift he has, and his message is even more impactful than the way he delivers it here.
FWIW, I don’t regard this subject with quite as much vitriol as Schmidt does, and for a few reasons:
Some of these people were born and raised in environments that are very different from yours and mine. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “Remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” That may sound condescending, but there is no doubt that people who had lousy educations and ignorant parents tend to be far more bigoted, rigid, and mean as a result.
How much enmity do we carry for the German people who stood by and let Hitler commit his genocides? Most of us carry little if any, simply because they were conned. Hating a conman’s victims is just asinine. This is what we learned about human nature, and it is as true now as it was 80 years ago: suffering people make easy targets for demagogues. Not to digress, but none of this is going to change in the future, unless we can improve our educational system–at least as far as our understanding of world history is concerned.
I wouldn’t say that I personally won’t be mending fences. As the months go by and Trump’s current supporters begin to become aware that he really did lose the election, and that he actually is a criminal, a great many of these people will come to rue the decisions they made in this arena, and admit, if only to themselves, that they were conned. I don’t need an apology from a single one of these 74 million people; I simply want to find the straightest and quickest course to getting as much of this garbage behind us as possible.
There is no value to anyone in leaving this gaping chasm in place between Trump supporters and the rest of us. If we’re going to have progress to all the social, economic, diplomatic and environmental goals we’d all so love to see, maintaining a wall between us offers no benefit at all.
Steve Schmidt didn’t write this. It was the Red State Rustler
Thanks for that. Because of that clue I was able to track down a link to the article, which I include here: https://www.facebook.com/TheRealRSR/posts/1807696746065591
People need to be more careful about lifting other people’s words without attribution.