One of the Good Ones

 I have lost friends over this Trump situation. You know, the whole he got re-elected for president of the United States again, which is going to be a got damned disaster on a global scale: you don't put a conman who owes unsavory characters money in charge of a country (which should be very, very obvious) but the macro level of this is something I can talk about later. I want to talk about why I lost friends.

I have been ringing the alarm bell on Trump since he took stage in this tragedy of errors we call a political landscape. He lost me from his first speech where he railed against Mexicans. And he really lost me when one of the first people to commend that speech was David Duke, a well known Klansman. 

I could go on and on about the outright racist, bigoted, or xenophobic statements that Trump has made. I could come up with a hell of a lot of thoughts about the rancid cult of personality that Trump has cultivated: it's awful and full of all of the worst people you can imagine.

I see these things and I synthesize these things and I try to tell people that none of this is good. It's not good for minorities. It's not good for America. It's not good for these ideas to be out in the public square and accepted as normal. None of it is good.

The problem is that one thing Republicans have been great at is convincing people that anything said against them is wrong. Usually it's some phrase of the day that's been borrowed from popular culture like "woke" or "liberal", you know, just a term they can throw a dart at and have their followers know it's wrong. So any efforts from a person like me, a guy who tries to rely on facts and synthesis and pass that information along to friends in a way they can understand completely fall by the wayside.

Well, this has all come to a head with this election. I honestly hoped we were all past all of the hatred, the bigotry, the outright ugliness that Trump has manifested. But apparently this is what people wanted to continue. Which is (not) fine. But it triggered a response in me that I don't know if I ever fully have had triggered in me. I understand what putting a racist bigot in office means: my life is in considerably more danger than it ever has been before. And I made the decision that I can no longer have Trump supporters as my close friends.

This news was not taken well by them.

There is an irony in all of that to me: if these friends listened to anything that I have said in the last 8 years or so they would know DIRECTLY where I stood on all of this. I was very clear that I didn't stand for any of Trump's nonsense. I was VERY clear that this has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats and everything to do with right vs wrong. I was VERY clear that the issues Trump and his gang of clowns had very little to do with politics or economy and everything to do with them getting their voters angry at their own neighbors. I was clear on ALL of this. I'm betting many people around the country were too. The irony is that had these friends listened to me they would know this was nothing about choosing not to be friends with them because of politics. 

I was trying to tell them where I stood as a human being. Voting for Trump disregarded all of that and even worse? As a black man it just gives me the vibe that those friends regard me as "one of the good ones". Nah. The only good thing I want to be associated with now is good trouble.

Any true friend of mine wouldn't be surprised in the least.