February 4, 2020
Since the 2016 election, I have worked so hard to minimize belief in long-term effects of the Trump administration—to view these four(!) years as an agonizing hiatus from some kind of less unacceptable norm. Terrible as these time are, I have imagined that once we’re rid of him and his, our culture will regain important standards it has lost (but not thereby automatically correct the many important longer-term problems that Trump’s advent has perpetuated or worsened).
For three years plus, I’ve tried to steel myself for the seemingly non-stop series of horrible policies and to accept that nothing he or his minions say can be trusted. I’ve tried NOT to read in depth about outrages, large or small. At rare times, when my own ox has been gored (as opposed to, for example, the immoral immigration policies that don’t affect my daily life), I’ve sometimes been forced harshly to recognize my own insulation from much of the prejudicial policies (not just towards people but everything, including the environment) and how much my privilege (especially being able to buy my way out of many deleterious effects) protects me even at the worst of times (so far). I have constantly reminded myself and others that the problem isn’t trump himself but the network of support and manipulation around him (as we have most recently seen clearly in the impeachment trial).
Some of that has helped me get through the last three years without total depression. I don’t know how I would get through another four. That would take me into my 80s. I expected still to have political issues as I aged, but not like these.*
None of that (I hope) has stopped me from hating what has been going on or refusing to collude with it to the extent I have any power in such matters. None of that has spared me from despair, albeit at a large distance, over all the victims, human and otherwise, of this administration, and especially children in cages or stripped from their parents. None of that
helps my terror of what his supporters, many of them armed, may do if he gets defeated (when, I assume, he will bluster that he really won the election).
But now, in recent days, I’ve had the intuition that many Trumpian effects (even if we avoid another civil war) will indeed have much longer-term durability. On just one level, there are all the permissions to chauvinistic Americans to indulge their prejudices, and it will likely take extended, strong efforts to curtail the resulting behavior. But more generally, I think some of
the disregard for a range of social behavior (for which I’ve never been an advocate) traditional courtesies and behavior have been seeping into our population beyond his core supporters (and to some degree other polities around the world). I’ve noticed individual examples that have given me this thought, but I didn’t note them down and at this point don’t remember the details. One that DOES stick in my mind is an event a friend posted about an angry man who pushed over someone in a wheelchair https://www.boston.com/news/national-news/2020/01/31/man-thrown-from-wheelchair-for-asking-able-bodied-driver-not-to-park-in-handicapped-space-police-say?fbclid=IwAR2MIG8RwLa6f5d5L1cYQAVgcxM7m0eL-oRkeEBereT6KHiK4pNUYeOrSAs). I suppose this could have happened at any time, but somehow it feels as though people feel more permission (perhaps even an invitation, to vent their anger in ways like this.
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*I’ve often been struck that “our” side has probably been having agonized feelings similar to those experienced by the pre-Trump right wing. I expect we have been resorting to similar desperate responses, filled with self-righteousness (except we’re right and they weren’t…): outraged social media postings and forwarding of e-mail messages, petitions galore, appeals for phone calls and letters to legislators, direct action—you name it.