You ever have a moment where the fog clears and you realize "what the hell was I doing?". If not it goes something like this. You spend a few days angry and upset, lashing out at anything and everything you consider a threat. You spend the rest of the time brooding and depressed, worried, legitimately for your future, but not doing anything about it. You place blame as if that fixes anything and find yourself in a cycle of hate with a bunch of trolls who are sending you death threats and wishes that you'll succumb early to your illness. As you do your mind becomes narrower, you focus in on those people and you assume, that's the face of those who voted for the other guy.
Then you get a wake-up call from someone eloquent and passionate. Someone like this -
You're reminded that the reason this happened isn't because the other side is the enemy. It's not because they're all racist, sexist and god knows what else. You realize that though they may have voted for somebody who clearly is, that's not necessarily why they did it. More to the point, that person didn't have a icecubes chance in hell if it were not for the colossal fuckups of the opposition. Democracy works when you have a capable, good-faith opposition. That's when things get done. That's when bi-partisan cooperation happens and when dialogue between factions occurs, because it has to. When you have an incompetent opposition, it all falls to pieces. You're not operating in a democracy at that point, you're living in an oligarchy. That's what the DNC was, incompetent opposition. That's what Hillary Clinton was, incompetent opposition. A weak candidate who couldn't keep her hands clean, had spent far too long schmoozing with Wall Street interests, playing the part of the good liberal while evidence piled up that she was more of a Hawkish neo-conservative, completely unable to inspire a country to rally behind her. And for what, because it was "her turn"? Because the DNC and the mainstream media did everything they could to shut out Bernie Sanders, the guy who actually had popular support and was inspiring a new generation of politically-engaged people? Was he too much of an outsider? Was he too left-wing for the supposed left-wing? Hell does America even have a left wing, because it looked to me like we had Right and Righter, Dumb and Dumber.
My reaction over the last few days has been driven by fear and the online face of Trumpism, a disgusting mass of cancerous trolls that infested Reddit with sexist, racist bigotry, that doxxed opposition, perpetuated lie after lie and accepted their victory with about as much grace as you would expect from such a group. They did what trolls do, baited a reaction and they got it. They poisoned the well and like the fool I am, I willingly drank from it. But the reality is that group is not 50 million strong, not even close. Their actions may very well have put my life at risk and it's going to be pretty hard to get over that but that wasn't their goal. They thought they were doing the right thing, just as we did. I may not be able to the fathom how anyone could vote for somebody who said all the things Donald Trump did but that's exactly how other people must have felt about Clinton. What I think isn't the be all and end all of everything, it's not the be all and end all of anything. The unforgivably ugly harassment thrown my way over my political opinion the last few days fed a preconception. It's a self-imposed kafka-trap, the notion that refusal to accept you're guilty of X is proof that you are guilty of X. I turned on a bug zapper and then acted surprised that it attracted bugs. More accurately, I saw that as proof of my dislike, that small minority became the false face of a much larger group of people. I live a fairly isolated life and I spend a lot of time on the internet, mostly due to the nature of my job. The only Trump supporter I've ever met in person was at LAX yesterday. A man easily in his 70s or older, wearing a Red MAGA hat, he was harassing a Latino employee because his oversized hand-luggage wouldn't fit in the thing that tells you whether or not your bag is too big for the overhead bins. He held up the TSA-pre line as he hurled abuse at this woman. He was eventually escorted out to boos of those around him. I recall yelling at him from the top of the escalator "Go fuck yourself you racist prick". I wish I'd got in his face over it, but let's be honest, we act like tough guys on the internet but when it comes to real life we'd prefer our conflicts be from a safe distance. That guy was the face of Trump supporters to me, the only real one I'd ever met. Everyone else, just voices on the internet, which trend towards the unpleasant. It was a couple of years ago when myself and my family went through extreme harassment, defamation and character-assassination at the hands of people very similar to this. Two sides of the same coin, people who view those with a different ideology to them as subhuman, the enemy, a vermin that required extermination. Back then I called for dialogue and pleaded with people not to view others as the enemy, try to understand where they were coming from, engage in discussion, find common ground. 2 years later I find myself having become the very thing I fought against. Extremism is alluring and I fell right into it.
Make no mistake about it, I still despise our president-elect. Whether it be his character, his thread-bare and terribly conceived policies, the awful, incompetent people he has now begun to surround himself with, climate-deniers, religious extremists, homophobic bigots, potentially Sarah-fucking-Palinwhatthefuckamerica. Don't mistake silence for a lack of research, I spent a lot of time over the last few months reading and learning about this person beyond his inane Tweeting and came to the conclusion that he sucks unfathomable amounts of ass. Regardless of that fact, tearing into other people because they don't think the way I do is pointless and unjustified. Some of the people who supported him clearly are racists, sexists, homophobes, islamaphobes, transphobes and god knows what else. And some I assume... are good people. Most, I assume... are good people.
There's 1 year left before I can hand in my British passport and become a citizen of the United States. After that I'll be able to vote, get involved in the political process, perhaps even run for some form of office myself. "Be the change you want to see in the world" and all that. Change isn't accomplished by whining on the internet. It's not accomplished by demonizing people that don't think the way you do. Well, not the change the left was looking for anyway. I've found motivation to become politically active in a real way, get out there and meet people who don't think the same way I do and learn why. Maybe I can help make peoples lives better in a real, tangible way. Maybe if I do only have a few years left on this planet, they should be spent making it better for the people I leave behind.
Offering an apology at this point would be an empty gesture.. I still harbour a deep resentment to those who made all of this happen. I have grounds to fear for my own life and the future of my family and countless others. Anyone who can't empathize with that is going to be difficult to have a conversation with. Much of my anger however is misplaced and aimed at the wrong people. This election didn't prove that America is awful and that a significant group (though not a majority) of people that live in it are terrible. This election proved that for all my high-minded rhetoric about morals, ethics and principles, when confronted with certain kinds of adversity I'm willing to throw all that away to engage in extremism and hatred. It proved that I have a lot of self-reflection to do, a lot of growing up still left over and a long, uncomfortable process of tearing down my own, internal bigotry and rebuilding myself as a better human-being.
That'll take a while, so I'd better make sure to stick around long enough to do it. To those who decided my political stance was justification for threats, harassment, bullying and hatred, thank you. You've given me a motivation to grow and become a better person and a bigger threat to your terrible behavior. For those who didn't but were offended by what I said, well, those are consequences I'll have to live with. Those feelings were real. Those feelings clouded by judgment, but that's not an excuse. If you decide you can't support me anymore, I don't blame you for a second. I deserve that consequence. Maybe I'll be able to earn back your trust some way down the road. Maybe not. Either way, there's a lot of healing to be done.
