Thoughts Fired

What will it take?

I struggle with the "I voted for Trump because" crowd, because it amounts to such fantastic levels of willful ignorance. I would never, not in my wildest dreams, consider voting for Charles Manson, one of the 9/11 conspirators, or, you know, Hitler just because they agreed with my stance on taxes or abortion. But apparently more than half of this country has no problem sleeping soundly while they ignore Trump's proven misogyny, racism, gay and trans hate, ableism, xenophobia, elitism, godlessness, hypocrisy, his disdain for our staunchest allies, his embrace of the world's worst dictators, his shunning of our most established legal and ethical principles, his status as a convicted felon, and his blatant and repeated lies ... all because he claims to support their pet issue.

I've been thinking a lot about this growing political divide in America, and there's a lot to unpack in it all. But, lately, I've seen more and more posts of random optimism: people are saying that the tide is turning or that "the wave is about to crash". They write as if the half of America that has already shown astounding blindness to the dismantling of everything that made this country exceptional (at the behest of a con artist who promised to make it simply great) are somehow or suddenly coming around to the truth the other half of us have been screaming about all along.

I value the optimism. I hope to be proven wrong. But I just don't see it.