Soon We Will Know Who We Are

By Joni Halpern

We are fast coming to a crossroads in our life as an American people.  We shall either be brothers and sisters emerging from a frenzy of chaos into the light of our motto, “Out of many, one.”  Or we shall hack apart the bonds of our American family, wrapping our hatred and hostility toward our fellow Americans in a flag of patriotism.

With the former choice, we will revitalize our democracy.  With the latter, we will shred our stripes and scatter our stars until they are strewn across the barren fields of our future as the United States of America.  We are only 50-some days from our destiny.

Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, I have tried to understand my fellow Americans who support him.  At first, it was said they felt forgotten by mainstream politics.  Their economic futures had been lost in the closures of manufacturing plants and the loss of thousands of other jobs to global forces.  No one in Washington cared.  People who supported Donald Trump said they wanted someone would take seriously their hunger for economic, social and political justice.

There were some ironies in their political goals, of course.  They wanted good streets, clean water, money to send their kids to good private and public schools, decent health care, disaster protection, a working electrical grid, and all the services government had long provided.  They liked being able to pay half a dollar to send a letter to any of our 50 states.  They liked getting unemployment and social security.

But they also hated government, hated paying taxes, hated helping the poor, and wanted certain religious convictions to be enforced by law.  They wanted their neighborhoods and their communities to be filled with people who looked like them, believed as they did, and were willing to withhold divergent opinions and lifestyles out of respect for the majority viewpoint.

Despite these contradictions, however, Donald Trump’s supporters include a great number of hard-working Americans who love their families, help their neighbors, run honest businesses and serve their fellow Americans in many different capacities.

Even if this is true, it still does not explain how these fine people could vote for someone who was not their equal, someone whose entire life had been built upon an ever-accelerating series of lies about the properties he bought, borrowed against, and drained of value in support of a lifestyle that was not just opulent, but imperial.  Supporters who worked for bare necessities or for middle class amenities fell at his feet as if he would deliver them, when in fact, he had left hundreds like them in the dust of his unpaid wages, broken contracts, worthless junk bonds and clandestine deals with unsavory characters whose only pursuits were money and power.  To hell with the working people.

Donald Trump promised his followers a rose garden.  He did not mention the fact that we would emerge from it bloody and ragged, thrashing against the thorns as we fight against enemies that once lived only in the darkest part of our hearts – our fears of being overcome by people of color, by immigrants, by Muslims, by same-sex couples, by people who suffered  historical injustice.

Donald Trump is not a man of great insight, but he is shrewd, and he has an unerring instinct for what people fear.  They fear what millions in this country have already experienced.  They fear being left out.  They fear they will not matter.  They fear that when the pie is divided, no one will remember to invite them to the table.  If they are already members of the middle class, they are afraid of what others might take from them.

Donald Trump is the President of our fears.  He presides over our fears of want, loss, change, and differences.  He seeks now to be the emperor of our souls, the man who makes a deal with us that we can never take back:  Give me your values, he says, and I will replace them with my own splendor.  Give me your honor, your honesty, your courage, compassion, mercy, and respect.  Give me your love, and I will rise to become the symbol of your sacrifice of all that you once held dear.

Donald Trump is not worthy to tie the shoe of the working people who support him.  They are not like him.  They work for a living.  They do not rely on liars, cheaters, thieves and charlatans to put food on their tables.  Few among them would disgrace their wives and daughters by bragging about their freedom to intrude on the bodily privacy of young women.  They would not disgrace their children or their spouses by belittling their choice to serve in the military.  They would not look down on those who became prisoners of war or died on the battlefield.  Many of Donald Trump’s supporters  attend church.  Many of them pray for deliverance.  Underneath those red hats and banners waving with Trump’s name, his supporters carry on lives that are nothing like his.

But over the last six years, this Pied Piper of a President has convinced his supporters that they really are like him, and that he, a man who has lived amid blasphemy and riches all his life, is really like them.  Mesmerized by his countenance, his supporters have dropped their sacred values and followed him, traipsing from one rally to the next, trying to grab a piece of the illusionary dazzle he drops on his way to the bank.  A bank where he deposits all that he and his family have looted from our national treasure.

His supporters won’t wake up until reality comes calling.  And then they will see the impossible trade they have made:  their insight, their values, their virtue —  for the empty promise that he will remember them when he sits down to gluttonize at the groaning table of spoils:  his autocracy, his theft of our tax dollars, his destruction of any unity we once enjoyed as the American People, and his destruction of everyone we once called global  friends.

We are at a fork in the American road.  We will decide not only for ourselves, but for generations to come, which road to take.  Do we follow the road of our American values:  honesty, decency, and the freedoms our Constitution promises to all?  Or do we follow the path of Donald Trump, a man who has proudly put his greed, racism, and misogyny on display?  A man who has finally envisioned what it would be like if he were king.

Fifty-plus days, and we choose the road that tells us who we are.