My Last WoW… On The Election!!!
The election is over. I’m done with it. But before I return to my regular WoW entries, I want to do a final factual accounting of the process.
Trump lost and Biden won. That is clear to any rational human being throughout the world.
Biden won the popular vote by over 5 million, but the Democrats lost some of their House members and did not win the number of seats necessary to control the Senate, unless they win both Georgia seats in the Jan. run-off.
After the last four years of the most irresponsible, morally deplorable administration in modern history, Trump received a full 10 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, and by and large, his demographics didn’t change.
These results indicate that an unprecedented 73 million American citizens said,
“Yeah, I think another 4 years of racism, conspiracies, corruption, brutish bullying, incompetent leadership that shows no empathy for human life, favors fiction over facts, and completely disregards the truth… is a good idea.”
And that’s not just my interpretation of the facts, that’s the truth based on results.
Why, why why??????
What in the world would lead 73 million people, most of whom are decent human beings, vote to support this?
“I don’t believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago.”
~ Anne Frank
You can fool all of the people some of the time:
I think we were all fooled some of the time. Hooked on sound bites, we were primed into a sense of urgency as we tuned into another night of high octane feed. Information was delivered with the intensity of a three-alarm fire. Trump and the media, especially TV, were made for each other. Media thrives on controversy and spectacle and Trump provided it several times a day. Trump needs and thrives on attention and they gave him lots of it. The media needs and thrives on deviancy and Trump provided ample quantities.
We were “had”. We got “taken”. We got caught up in the drama. We were fooled by Trump. Even if you didn’t watch TV, you were likely on social media or read the print news. If you managed to avoid these, no conversation was complete without mentioning his name.
Although we must remain ever vigilant of people like Trump, and although we must take a stand for all that is good and right about this country, we must also be aware our constant attention fed the media. The monster ate it up and we kept him alive.
Some of the following analysis is more complicated than I present here, but as a summary it will suffice.
You can fool some of the people all of the time:
This is the majority of Trump’s base. They have little knowledge of history, lack an understanding of the ways of the world and they are just plain scared. Most are not bad people. At heart, they are good people, but they are scared people. Their anger is only there to cover up the vulnerability of their fear. They’re afraid they’ll lose all they have ever known; afraid someone will overtake their White race or try to take away their jobs, their guns or their God. They are terrified of change and their insecurity has them desperately seek survival as they lash out with a self-protective vengeance. The Trump conspiracies give them a false sense of security. They grasp on to his lies like a lifeline. The anger makes them feel powerful,
Gullible people have been a segment of society since the beginning of time. They are blind followers who feel they are losing at the game of life and think they are powerless to change it. Lost in a confusing world, they find security in the arms of a dominant authority figure and they hand over their allegiance to be used in any way the authority sees fit, often to his/her own advantage. Their need for safety and security makes these people highly susceptible to manipulation and control.
They are victims who willingly (and often unknowingly) abandon their tentative hold on their own values (which they think never worked for them anyway) and follow the leadership of the one who presents an alternate realty, one that feeds their rage at the privileged who are “winning” yet, promises a better tomorrow for them. They enter an alternate universe where all that matters is what serves the dictator, the ruler, the dominant authority. It is completely void of truth and facts as is evidenced in figures like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao Tse Dong, Kim Jong-il and cult leaders like David Koresh and Jim Jones.
People need to feel safe and they will do whatever they need to in order to survive. Once they have placed their survival in the authority figure, facts and truth don’t matter anymore, and reasoning does not work with them.
Love them, care about them, but let go of trying to change them. Gullible people will always be a part of society and cult leaders like Trump will continue to use and abuse them for their own selfish benefit.
This is the group of people you can fool all of the time. As Trump said himself,
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
Prices and Payoffs: With every choice we make in life, there are Prices and Payoffs. The following are among the 73 million who supported Trump. Fortunately, they did not prevail, but their choice cast a big blow to the moral core of our great country. They chose their issue at the expense of equality, justice, truth and the common good…and that’s a big price to pay.
To vote for Trump, they all had to compromise something – the opportunity to help the nation heal, their personal growth, possibilities for improvement, the tenets of their faith and most especially, their values….
The Racists: These are the White Supremacists and the neo-Nazis. They are hard core racists and proud of it. They are everywhere. They feel it is more important to hate and be superior to others than to experience the glory and benefits of love and acceptance.
The soft core racists are those who are unconsciously racist, but won’t admit it and are unwilling to look. They think the race issue is overblown and that we should just “all move on”. It is more important for them to remain in self-protective denial than to search their souls and own up to the role their denial plays in perpetuating racism.
The Poorly Educated and Uninformed: These are people who have little knowledge of history and how despots like Mussolini and Hitler came into power. They have no desire to learn about the scientific method or understand the social sciences or listen to medical experts, or face the reality of climate change and how we are destroying our Planet Earth. Instead, they choose ignorance over informed decisions based on truth that will benefit all humanity (most especially themselves).
The Mixed-Up Patriot: These are flag-waving xenophobes who have an aversion to and a fear of foreigners or anything foreign. They think loving your country means America is all that matters. America First is more important than a healthy planet capable of sustaining life for future generations (including their own). It’s more important to wave the flag and think America can do no wrong as the shining city on the hill, than to do an honest moral self-inventory of the state of our systems and how they affect our citizenry – which will do nothing but strengthen us.
The Jobless: This group is a sub-set of Mixed-Up Patriot. These are people who think foreigners are taking their jobs. In reality, they are being replaced by job outsourcing, artificial intelligence and other technologies. They blast the Mexicans when in reality, they won’t do the work that Mexicans and other immigrants are more than willing to do just to live here. It is more important for them to blame foreigners and remain jobless than to support a party that advocates free job training and social services for those in need from which they can benefit!
The Mixed-Up Anti-Socialist: These are people who think anything that supports security for people within our social system is hard core Marxist Socialism! They believed the rhetoric thrown at them by Trump that Biden is a “Socialist”, Democrats are “Socialists”, and our country is on a slippery slope to socialism. None of which is true. As a country, we are not even close to socialism. Most of these people have no idea what the difference is between socialism, liberalism, humanism, capitalism or communism. It is more important for them to fight against an ideology they don’t even understand than to entertain possibilities that can be beneficial for the well-being of all our citizens including them.
The Single-Issue Voters: Like the others, these are people for whom it is more important to be right than it is to have a country that works for everyone.
They are:
The Evangelical Christians and Religious Right who think they have the right to tell women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies and a right to decide a person’s sexual identity as well as who they can love and marry. Someone sent me literature claiming Biden would kill babies! That kind of rhetoric is so wrong (on many levels), but their self- righteousness is more important than it is to follow basic biblical teachings and the true Christian Jesus who taught Love thy neighbor… Do unto others… etc.
The Gun Owners: These folks believe everyone has a right to own and use any kind of gun they want, even though weapons designed for war have been the favored choice for most every mass murderer. They would rather own and openly wield an AR-15 than save the lives of our precious children, like the 20 innocent little angels massacred in their classroom along with their teachers in Newtown, Conn.
The Staunch Republican: These are people who has voted the Republican ticket their whole life and fervently believes in the Republican platform no matter what. They are completely willing to overlook the reality that Trump has hijacked the Party and is morally destroying it from within. Supporting the Republican Party under Trump was contributing to its demise.
But, it was more important for them to vote Republican than to save the integrity of their Party.
Money and Wealth: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Trump promised his plans would bring prosperity to the long over-looked working class. What he ended up doing is what every Republican president has done since Reagan – delivered wealth for the already rich at the expense of the poor. His 2017 sizable tax cuts went to the corporations who, in turn, agreed to provide new job opportunities as well as increased salaries for their employees.
Neither happened.
The money saved in taxes was fed back into the companies for yet again, increased profit. He threw a few minor tax morsels to the middle class to keep them quiet and now, his total lack of leadership with the pandemic has inflated the wealth of billionaires as main-street America reels under a Depression-level crisis. Massive salaries and bonuses go to the well-positioned privileged CEOs and senior executives, while the true “essential workers” scrape by.
The payoff for financial excess is obvious. The price is a diminishing middle class and an ever increasing economic disparity. Historically (there’s the understanding of history again!!) the only thing that has cured income inequality is catastrophe. Revolutions, massive wars and collapsed states are what reliably reduce economic disparity. For these people, money and greed has been more important than a fair and just society in which all can profit and feel secure.
My Conclusion:
You can’t fool all of the people all of the time
I believe the vast majority of the 250 million who voted are among all of the people (regardless of their issues), you can’t fool all of the time. I believe they are reasonable people underneath their vote and like many of the Republican Senators, they will change their minds when Trump’s presence is out of the White House.
The results of Biden winning by more than 5 million votes in the highest voter turnout in our history, does not give me cause for great joy and elation, nor does the support for Trump leave me in utter despair.
I am confronted, rather, by a sobering reality. I have come to realize we are a more nescient democracy than I formally believed. Our spiritual consciousness and ability for rational, deductive thinking as a whole is undeveloped. We are, in fact, an adolescent country in the midst of a social experiment. It is messy, it is extreme at times and can be very ugly.
I am also very aware from the work I have done with countless thousands of people, from all walks of life around the world, regardless of race, religion, age, ethnicity or sexual orientation, that beneath the anger, hurt, pain and fear, lies the most fundamental core human need—to love be loved. Love is always there, but fear can drag us away and we can easily lose touch with it. If we are to survive as a human race, and I believe we will, we must find ways to connect and build on our similarities.
If we can all stop for one minute and agree to the TRUTH that we all love our country, that we all want to be free, and we all want acceptance, respect and yes, love, then we can find a way forward. Let’s start there.
The flag of the United States of America belongs to ALL of us. Let’s all of us give in a little and be willing to shift our framework of thinking away from believing that winning means someone has to lose.
Let’s open up to an entirely new possibility and be willing to find a way for all of us to win. Let’s reach out to one another and find a way for our country to work for the well-being of every decent human being…
“We’re all alive, but we don’t know why or what for; we’re all searching for happiness; we’re all leading lives that are different and yet the same.
In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart”
~Anne Frank
Yes, Anne… almost everyone. With many thanks to so many of you who have shared your opinions and articles during these past challenging months leading up to the election.. I listen to every single one and from time to time, you will likely see your influence in my writing. We are all in this together. I appreciate your participation.
