Donald Trump in Our Town
A few months ago, I experienced candidate Trump's foothold in my mostly white, but economically diverse New Hampshire town. He held a rally at the community center five miles from my home. I reserved a ticket because I wanted to see what the baffling frenzy was about. I feared what New Hampshire's own, Ken Burns, referred to last June as, "the troubling unfiltered Tourettes of Trump's tribalism" and how it could eviscerate our political system and God knows what else.
On the morning of the event, I stopped at the center to swim and ran into the regular weekday crowd: people with whom I've spent the last decade sharing smiles, stories about our hips and hearts, job frustrations, the rising costs of health care--the usual. When politics came up, we agreed to disagree. Our collective white privilege went unacknowledged.
This day was different. The lobby was raucous with the voices of Trump supporters. A few Brazilian cleaners mopped around us silently while preparing for the crowd ahead.
"Bang, bang!" Someone laughed over the noise of a vacuum in the long corridor toward the snack machines-- a not so subtle reference to Trump's pro-gun position.
In the locker room, a few Hillary-aged women talked over their hairdryers. "I don't trust her," one said.
Beside the hot tub, George who'd survived an automobile accident, but lost his job, and another middle-aged man I recognized by face but not name, volleyed their opinions:
"People are calling me racist for supporting Trump. I voted for Obama last time. Gimme a break. The guy was too weak."
"I just want somebody who knows how to balance the budget."
"I have a job, but I don't have money. I'm tired of giving a free ride to people who aren't from here."
"I don't care what the hell he does in his private life. We're voting for a President, not a Sunday School teacher."
I cringed and gripped the towel around my body. How can these two guys care more about a man's flashy wealth than who he hurts along the way?
How can it be that the parallel lines of experience between me and my neighbors of the last ten years have grown so wide with this election that it's increasingly hard to bridge the political distance between us? I saw a man running a divisive, clickbait campaign. Many of these neighbors saw a wealthy renegade who affirmed a myth of the American rugged individual. I envisioned an opportunity for our country to reflect inwardly and to confront the moral obligation of centuries institutionalized racism, sexism and climate change. These neighbors latched onto a man with an entrepreneurial drive who has profited personally and financially, making a career out of more than questionable acts and rigging his own system.
On my way back to the locker room, I passed a line of fidgety pre-schoolers waiting for their swim lessons, the ones whose European ancestors came of age expecting that America's dream institutions were open to them if they worked hard enough. By the time Trump made his debut in our little town, these children would be all tucked into bed, perhaps a few of them re-applying their "flesh" colored Band Aids that peeled off in the pool. To what extent, if at all, do their parents acknowledge that laws in our country have always existed to afford more opportunity to some than others, and to police certain kinds of bodies?
Shifting geopolitics and the global economy make us all feel vulnerable, but I fail to see hope in an outcome where a man in power intimidates children and women, and threatens immigrant and minority families with registration, surveillance, and deportation. How can anyone overlook the lack of principles inherent in a man who tacitly condones his endorsement by white nationalists and the KKK, repudiating every civil right that so many people have lived and died and are still dying for?
"What are we supposed to do? Both candidates are lousy!" I heard again while I dressed, dried my hair and struggled with a creeping sensation that my day, my community, my country were collectively and uncontrollably slipping away.
Are our paychecks what actually ties us to the American dream? Bigger bank accounts have never truly eclipsed the value we entrust to human decency. The same value we uphold when we vote and hope to instill in our children when we send them to school or when they attend church, synagogue, mosque or temple?
On my way out of the building, I thanked the Brazilian cleaners wiping the glass doors and ran into Mike again. "Campaigns are always filled with hot air. Relax. He said.
"Why would a candidate for President say something he doesn't mean?" I asked, turning away.
I drove home thinking that this campaign has created a political future that feels more like a slot machine than a caucus, each of our votes, a pull of the lever --the outcome, random and independent, and our America, dazed and bleary-eyed, hoping it would somehow hit the jackpot. Instead, I feared we would all be going home with empty pockets, deep remorse and our American spirit broken.
I didn't go to the rally that day. But five thousand other people from my community did. One was my neighbor, my ticket in his pocket.
Trump told the crowd, "We are going to start winning again."
Winning what?
The morning after the election, I chatted briefly with Mary, a health care worker who was swimming in the lane next to me. "He's going to get things done. Our country needed a change like this. It won't be so bad, you'll see." I took no solace in her words.
On the first weekend of December, the KKK held a victory rally for the election in Roxboro, NC. A convoy of 30 cars drove through the city draped in Confederate flags and their passengers shouting, "White power!" Their "imperial kommander" was reported by the Times-News as saying, "I think Donald Trump is going to do some really good things and turn this country around."
This is not the America I recognize or believe in.
* Ken Burns, Stanford University Commencement Speech, June 12, 2016