Let me relate a story that happened last week while on a work trip.
Been working with this guy for probably 7 years now. He's probably 30 years my senior. He's always been far right but kept it in check most of time around me. This is the Texas/Southern crew who say n***** in casual conversation with each other. I've talked about them before.
So this trip he was spoiling for a fight. Kept casually mentioning unprompted how he was proud of Trump for the whole North Korea thing. Good work, glad it pissed off the Liberals, at least someone is doing something, all the usual rhetoric. He's been posting lib bait Facebook memes with regularity for like the last month.
I stupidly decide to engage him on the topic.
We don't get very far on that particular topic because he generally doesn't allow me to get a word in edgewise, and keeps jumping to the next thing that pisses him off. I comment he seems angry. "Oh I'm not angry." 30 seconds later he's ragging on Obama.
He finally lands on immigration. "Why they hell do they always send us their poor and their criminals? Why don't they send us doctors and engineers and shit."
(Point in fact, they do send us their talent as well as their least.)
"It says right on the statue to send us their poor."
"Nah fuck that."
(That bit was actually added to the statue after it was built but it's been a part of it and of our immigration policy for most of its life and all of mine.)
I don't even get a chance to talk about that further before he jumps again.
"Austria just closed like 3 mosques and kicked those bastards out of the country. Why can't we do that!"
"Because it says in the Constitution we don't do that."
"Nah, fuck that."
"What do you want me to say? It's _in_ the Constitution." (I would have gone on about how the people who wrote the Constitution fled a country where their churches were under attack, but he didn't really give me the chance.)
"Nah, fuck that. Your generation is fucked in the head! I'm done! You guys are fucked in the head."
*storms off*
"Cmon man, let's not leave it at that."
"No fuck that I'm done."
Later on we "made up" and went back to talking and chatting about non-political stuff. But that one will stick with me.
I constantly see them describe other people's disagreement with them as hatred of them or the things they identify with. "They hate our country. They hate our freedoms. They hate Jesus. They hate Christmas. They hate babies." etc...
They're just coming to terms with what has always been behind polite conversation. People on the other side of the spectrum don't just disagree with their views, they're repulsed by them. The same repulsion a conservative far right Christian feels about abortion and gay marriage is the same moral repulsion a liberal democrat on the left feels about wanting to make an entire religion illegal or dictating what you can do with your body or what rights you're allowed to have based on your sexual identity. What kept the Left and Right talking to each other pre-Trump was the fact the Right kept their actual opinions to themselves for the most part, while the Left would loudly denounce those beliefs to the air (while pointedly staring at people on the right.)
All Trump has done is obliterate polite conversation, stripped away the pretense. No one is pussyfooting around their beliefs anymore or carefully trying to make a seemingly neutral argument for it in public. People on the far right now feel empowered to say exactly what they feel, and their anger is them preparing to be bombarded with dislike and yes, hatred, for saying it loudly and in public. People on the far left now feel morally obligated to stand just as tall and denounce people to their face because there is no moral ambiguity left to let shit quietly slide. If someone boldly proclaims <the worst shit imaginable>, it is no longer the case that everyone just kind of glances away and ostracizes them via not acknowledging them. That's old American polite political discourse. That's how we used to informally set boundaries on acceptable political speech.
Now those ideas are no longer being ostracized by default in every day conversation. People may not agree but they're no longer treating those people as on the fringe. And so those on the far Left now feel like if you don't call out <the worst shit imaginable>, you're essentially giving it a pass.
Which is exactly how the right feels about abortion and gay marriage. I hate to say it, but now the Left truly knows what the Right been experiencing for the last 35 or so years as America has steadily grown more progressive and diverse. The fears about what will happen to the country under Bush now seem almost benign compared to how fast and dramatically Trump is changing shit around. And the Right is jubilant about how much this is scaring the Left. The outrageous and frankly unacceptable things some of them are saying are just an effort to twist the knife further, by saying it louder and with so little shame it's almost become arrogance. What scares me a bit is that it feels like they're riding an emotional high off of all this, probably the same way liberals on the left were crazy excited when Obama was elected. The Right now sees the Left losing its mind over Trump, and how he is rolling back one section at a time all the progressive changes that go back before my time. They believe it's just deserts for the Left. And they're adding fuel to the fire but are in no way in control of anything that is happening. This isn't some coldly managed Republican take back of the country. This is populism with zero control or accountability. That will eventually come back to bite everyone collectively in the ass.
Which is a point I tried to make my friend there, and it's the only thing I said in our little exchange that even gave him pause. He said all this ridiculous shit and went 'Hell I don't care, I'm gonna retire soon anyways.'
To which I replied "Yeah but the rest of us still have to live here. We still have to get jobs, pay bills and take care of families. We have to deal with the chaos you're cheerleading." And he nodded for a minute and immediately thought of his grandkids and almost, for a second, we had a sort of understanding that we are actually all in this together.
And then it disappeared like smoke on the wind, because he reminded himself he's providing for his grandkids and that was "good enough." He passed his moral gut check by looking as far as his immediate family and calling it good.
Honestly I've just had a bad day of sampling too much political negativity out there. Watched a youtube video of that teacher of the year up in Washington that resigned and made national headlines for crying during her resignation speech and talking about all the bad shit going down at their school.
And I made the mistake of reading the comments. Every. Single. One. was just like "black people." About 50 comments in it advanced to "lynch em." You're used to seeing that stuff in Youtube comments. But the sheer density and consistency of them was.....scary. That and all the posts just blanketly saying "thanks Dems" until it became Dems fault that the entire country ever went down the wrong path. No one wants to fix shit. They just want someone to blame.
We are headed for dark days.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office is praising the "courageous" decision by the Trump administration to pull out of the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council.
I guess Human Rights are only useful when you're the one that needs them.
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