Delving Into the Divide

At an LGBT campaign fundraising event in New York City back in 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton had this to say:      

I know there are only 60 days left to make our case – and don't get complacent; don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, ‘Well, he's done this time.’ We are living in a volatile political environment.        

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.    Right?  They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it.  And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.  Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.     

But the ‘other’ basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here:  I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that ‘other’ basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change.  It doesn't really even matter where it comes from.  They don't buy everything he says, but — he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different.  They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.   

 -September 9, 2016         

That sure seems like another million years ago, eh?  However crudely Clinton stumbled into this – Donald Trump picked it up and ran with it.  All the way to the Whitehouse.  

I may despise Donald Trump (the person) but I absolutely get how his base feels.  Yeah, I get it.  It is real.  The more I read those words the more unsettled even I can get.  My neighbors are Americans.  While we may not agree on each and every last of the few differences we might have they are my countrymen.  Parsing them into ‘baskets’ and calling them ‘deplorable’ is wrong.   

Words have consequences, eh?