Paradigm shift in Deplorable thoughts

The quote was sent to me by a friend and it is stunningly apt.

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all.
He saw to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth,
impotence into abstinence,
arrogance into humility,
plunder into philanthropy,
thievery into honor,
blasphemy into wisdom,
brutality into patriotism,
and sadism into justice.
Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all.
It merely required no character.”
- Joseph Heller, “Catch 22”

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How to start this?
How to voice what is a massive shift in my core beliefs?
How to make inchoate less incoherent?

I have to just accept it. This is going to be a jumble.

There are two numbers that I cannot get out of my head.
They’re signs to me that things I believed in are patently false
and I either have to stop believing them or simply learn not to care.

The first number is vague but enormous - more than 2 million and growing.
That one’s obvious.
Anyone following the news knows that’s the number of votes
by which Clinton won the popular vote.
So much for the fable of democracy.
(And I really loved the fable of democracy, like a child loves the fact of Santa.)
One person may get one vote, but those votes are not equal,
And in this election, my vote weighed nothing.

I am an independent voter.
I have voted as many times for either party’s presidential candidate.
Every election is different.
Every election takes a weighing of the alternatives and a decision made given the facts at hand.
This year, however, it was not even a question of for whom I should vote.
When a jackass is running for president, you don’t vote for the jackass.
I’m sorry. That was poorly stated.
When a person completely unqualified - intellectually, emotionally, and ethically -
is running for president, you vote for someone rational, in other words, not the jackass.
Whoops, that’s not much better, but that’s the problem with trying to dealing with the ridiculous. It just doesn’t parse rationally.

Personally, I am angry that my vote did not matter at all.
I knew that from the beginning of the process,
but that’s not how a democracy is supposed to work.
My vote should matter as much as any other citizen’s, but because I live in this state
my vote in the larger pool, my voice in the national election, was completely discounted.
There was never a doubt. I cast my vote knowing that I was just wasting my time.
The system is fatally flawed.

I wasn’t worried though. I knew that although I live in an area known for its historical political idiocy, the nation I live in that is better than that. My state might go moronic and obliterate my vote with it, but my nation, my nation knew better and would save us from the stirred up mindless rant-chanters who swallowed the snake-oil sold them
and screamed for more.
We, I knew, absolutely knew, we were a collectively better people than that.
A person of very little faith in anything, I had faith in that.

I was stunned to be proven wrong.

Which brings me to the second number - 58,815.

Once upon a time, early in my voting career,
the Republican State Representative of Louisiana was a man named David Duke.
A lovely man he,
a sometime member of such august organizations as the American Nazi party,
the national Association for the Advancement of White People,
and, of course, the KKK
- of which he became the Grand Wizard
(laughably titled, how can something so evil sound so silly?),
the leader of the cowardly sheet-wearing pointy hooded model citizens of my state.

He served one highly embarrassing term and then was out of office.
In 91, he ran for governor of Louisiana and lost.
In 92, he ran in the Republican presidential primary and lost.
In 96, he ran for the Senate and lost.
In 99, he ran for the House of Representatives and lost yet again.
And I was so glad to witness his every failure.
I felt it was a sign that he was no longer relevant,
that we’d grown beyond him and his abhorrent views.
I saw the fall and eventual disappearance of DD from the public eye to be a lovely proof of public moral growth, a movement toward the state I wanted to be proud to be from.

58,815
Because of the tenor of the presidential campaign,
because that orange jackass took spewing hatred gleefully public,
because he pretended not to know who Duke was and what he stood for,
because he refused to denounce praise and endorsement
from the execrable poster boy of white supremacists,
David Duke crawled out of the woodwork and ran for office yet again.
And, yes, while his hero was winning the big election,
DD did lose his race,
but he won 58,815 votes.
58,815
deeply bigoted and disturbed people in my state said “Yes, we want a Neo-Nazi representing us.”

And that kills me almost as much as the jack-ass elect winning his race.
I know these people. I’m related to several of them.

As for the jackass elect and the people who voted for him,
it shakes my faith in the general nature of people.
That so many of them across the entire nation voted for someone so openly vile amazes me.

To vote for him you had to do one of the following:
- You had to agree with his racist, misogynistic, xenophobic… (insert the rest of the catalog of apt labels here, I’m done)… views;
Or
- You had to believe he is all of the above, but didn’t care enough to oppose him
because he said something you really liked
and you’ll forgive the rest to get that bit;
Or
- You had to believe he isn’t all of the above,
but simply using people with deplorable mindsets to further his personal agenda
no matter how much damage it does to the country,
but you’re okay with that.

So, to my mind, in order to vote for that man,
you had to have be either vile yourself
or okay with enabling vileness.

And so many people voted for him.
Most of the people I know voted for him.
I no longer have to be embarassed to be a part of a state
with historically underdeveloped ethics.
That’s small change, old news.
Now I am a citizen of a country that has proven itself
unintelligent and easily duped at best, immoral and actively evil at worst.

All this has brought me to a personal shift of basic beliefs.
I cannot reconcile these new facts with the world I thought I lived in.

I really have always thought people were basically good,
that prejudice was something on the decline,
and that my country was inherently moral.
I do not still believe this and it hurts my heart,

Since the election, I have been struggling to understand
why the result has left me in a slow spiral of despair
and this is the closest I can come to an answer.
I have seen avarice and evil elevated and celebrated
as I had never dreamt possible in the open light of day,
but there it has been, out in public view,
and millions and millions saw it and embraced it openly and completely without shame.
The mob is ecstatic now that it thinks it rules,
oblivious to the fact that it has been played by a master
and the men behind his curtain.

But they are part of us,
the loud screaming mob that we did not take seriously enough
to recognize as beyond dangerous.
We did not stop them and so we are complicit
in their rise to the position of ultimate power in our nation.

If this is who we are, then we have gotten exactly what we deserve.

Thus have I been eviscerated of my faith and shorn of my optimism.
I mourn my loss of hope.

Last updated November 28, 2016