I’m Disturbed by 2016 Me
I’m Disturbed by 2016 Me
On November 9th, 2016, I wrote a blog post that included these 4 paragraphs:
Trump won. If you supported Trump, then you are the winners. And with great power comes great responsibility. The winners have the upper hand, and they have to be the bigger person. Trump supporters have control of the House, the Senate and now the Presidency. Which means you've got work to do. And if you're sincere about wanting the country to come together, then it's up to you to make it happen. You're in the lead. It's on your shoulders.
How will you do it? I'm not sure. But I can bet it won't involve reading Breitbart or the Drudge Report or watching Fox News or Ann Coulter or Savage Nation, or listening to Rush Limbaugh. That stuff is poison. It does more to keep the country divided than almost anything else I can think of. If you partake of it regularly, I urge you to try an experiment. Go cold turkey off of it for a few weeks. Use something like the BBC (which is based in the UK and can report on US happenings with more neutrality) or any standard mainstream outlets with trained journalists.
With the poisonous stuff gone, you may be amazed to learn that the economy is stable. That you don't actually hate the people you’ve been told to hate. That talking about gun reform doesn't mean someone is trying to take your guns. That there is no Gay Agenda or Feminist Agenda other than being treated like equal human beings. It will be a relief, I promise.
It's not about avoiding different points of view, it's about steering clear of the extreme stuff. The extreme outlets are not going to encourage anyone to come together. They can only thrive with an enemy.
The reaction back in 2016 was swift and intense. There were over 400 comments on the post. Many of them from Trump voters who felt angry at my suggestion that as the winning party, they should lead out reconciliation efforts. And also angry that I dared point out their non-stop diet of poisoned media. Though they had won, they were sure they were somehow the victims in all of this. The term “sore winner” was coined.
The post is no longer live, but from the backend of my blog, I read through the comments this morning, and I was sort of shocked to see how earnestly open-minded I, and so many fellow HRC voters, were about the upcoming presidency. We were clearly devastated by the loss, but also trying desperately to be hopeful about checks and balances that might keep things from getting out of hand. Trump voters expressed confidence he had only great people on his team, that he would run the country as a successful businessman, that his threats toward immigrants didn’t mean anything and could be ignored. We very much wanted to borrow their confidence that the presidency would shape Trump into a better man.
I was disturbed seeing my 2016 willingness to invite commentary from all sides, my attempts to listen to and understand the defensive reasoning of third party voters, my patient responses to vitriol about Hillary and her unforgivable sin of having a private email server.
It’s so clear that too few people (including myself) understood how bad it was going to get. It’s so clear that we weren’t angry enough.