Musician David Crosby Isn’t Cultivating an Audience of Trump Supporters
David Crosby happens to live near me, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him a couple of times. Let me tell you, here’s hard to miss with that imposing head (and face) full of gray hair and a smile the size of all outdoors.
His Facebook post is here funny, of course, but there is a serious point to be made here as well–and it’s not that he needs to pay more attention to his punctuation. Rather, it’s that progressives couldn’t care less about the admiration of Trump supporters; in fact, we’d know we were doing something wrong if we actually had it.
Needless to say, 2GreenEnergy has a tiny fraction of the popularity of Crosby’s music. Yet our overall situation is strangely similar, in that people constantly ask me if I’m aware that I alienate Trump supporters with my comments on the political aspects of energy and the environment. Yes, I am. Thanks very much (though I won’t be as overtly nasty about it as Crosby).
It’s actually a bit insulting. Does someone think I could possibly care that white supremacists, sex criminals, war-mongers and Earth plunderers don’t like me? I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Craig,
Sometimes do you ever step back and read what you write objectively?
The first strategies of any intolerant movement with totalitarian objectives is to denigrate and de-humanize opponents.
It’s a tactic employed by all would-be demagogues seeking to elevate themselves and their followers to a ‘righteous class’ while reviling dissenters. By this process it becomes so much easier to call people “deplorables’ while eroding and dening their rights as fellow citizens, or even human beings.
When the time comes, it makes it easier to kill them, because well,… they’re’ not really the same as you, and anyway they deserve it !
Hatred and contempt only beget more hate and contempt ! Did Martin Luther King’s example teach you nothing, or were you too busy shouting to listen ?
I will soon return to the UK and spend Christmas in the old home where I was born. Despite considering my real home to be half a world away in Australia, I always get a lot of satisfaction promoting practical environmental technologies in the land of my birth.
I will take away from America treasured memories of the people I’ve met, along with the lessons and insights I’ve learned.
I wouldn’t have enjoyed the privilege of meeting and seeing problems through the eyes of others if I had spent my time yelling at them and alienating those with different opinions or experiences.
I’ve met tens of thousands of good warm-hearted, sincere and honest Trump supporters. I’ve listened to their aspirations and fears, sometimes I’ve even managed to find common ground.
It takes a certain amount of humility. I don’t believe I am so elevated (or so righteous) as to spurn the opinions, beliefs and fears of my fellow human beings.
Perhaps, as an American you should re-read Nellie Harper Lee’s book to Kill A Mockingbird where the character Atticus Finch observes to his daughter,
“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
When I return to the UK i will become involved with the developing battle over returning control of UK fishing back to Britain after Brexit.
EU regulations have devastated fish stocks and fish species.
For the last 34 years, the Common Fisheries Policy quota has given 84 per cent of the cod in the English Channel to France and just 9 per cent to Britain. EU fleets take about six times as much fish out of UK waters as the UK takes from EU waters.
EU fishing is indiscriminate and unsustainable. The scale and greed of nations like France is unbelievable.
It’s time the UK took charge of it’s own fisheries, and studied the environmental impacts independently.