Lessons in Humility from Donald Trump, part 2
Though I lived for a year in politically conservative and economically un-affluent Clarksville, Tennessee, a place populated, in 2004, by Bush-Cheney signs and billboards announcing that JESUS SAVES, and where most of my students who found new apartments felt they had done so, to quote at least one of them, „because I prayed to Jesus, and he answered me,“ I felt as if I had wandered into a temporary twilight zone, far from the „real America“ I usually inhabited. But, unbeknownst to me and the narcissism of my kind, it was, in fact, the real America I was actually in– the very same America that, last night, elected Donald J. Trump the 35th President of the United States.
Many of my fellow Americans, I now realize– somewhere, at least, around half of those who voted– are unhappy with the hand life, and this country’s present political establishment, has dealt them. They are unhappy with the jobs they have or, worse yet, those they lost or cannot find. They are unhappy with their children’s schools. They are unhappy with the lack of healthy, affordable food in their supermarkets. They are unhappy with the opiates they and many of their children have been reduced to swallowing as a way of escaping from the reality that surrounds them. They are unhappy about being White in a nation that is increasingly dark or light brown of complexion, or yellow-skinned, or Spanish-speaking, or Moslem. They feel– from the color of their skin to the quality of their sheets to the content of their shopping carts, to the stubs of their paychecks– like an endangered species in the land of the free and the home of the brave. They are the people I should long ago have seen more clearly, and who elected Donald J. Trump– a greedy, mendacious, bigoted, ignorant, misogynistic and egomaniacal man who promised them salvation without details and cures without programs– the next President of the United States.
I missed those people, Donald Trump taught me this week, because I was too busy fastening my gaze on myself and those who are too much like me. I missed them because, to paraphrase something death penalty lawyer Bryan Stevenson said at WVU the other night, I failed to be „proximate“ to those who, along with my own privileged kind, are my true countrymen, the shadow side of my kind’s affluence and privilege.
Donald Trump, and Donald Trump’s victory, taught me that. And for that, if for nothing else, I owe him my gratitude.