The Chimera of the Call for Unity

On November 10th, I met an old friend on my way into New York City–that extra spring in your step when you feel energized and vindicated.  The sky seemed bluer, the air crisper, and my heels seemed like they could click as high as I wanted. On my trek uptown, I felt empowered for the first time in almost a decade.

When my conservative dentist walked into the examining room, we high-fived and excitedly chatted about the election.  Then we started exchanging stories about our kids and how despondent some of them were; how what we had taught them over 18 years had been nullified in four by leftwing universities–and we paid for it.

I wish the youth could understand that we fought the political battles of the last decade with their futures in mind; that the Trump victory and red map were a repudiation of a chronically sick political system, rotting from the inside out, eroding their potential, encroaching on their freedoms.  I wish America’s offspring understood that this election had nothing to do with the LGBTQ rights or abortion issues that are fueling their collective temper tantrum.

It wasn’t for lack of trying.  The Democrat-Media Complex—in cahoots with the DNC and Clinton campaign—attempted to nudge the debate in that direction, but the voters of 2016 knew that LGBTQ rights and abortion fights were not on the table, implicitly acknowledging that our culture wars must play second fiddle to much bigger issues.  If we cannot put food on the table, protect our citizens, save for retirement, keep our homes, and educate the next generation, America will be condemned to the history books as just another republic the people could not keep.

As stupid as Trump voters were cast, as uneducated and backwards as his working class supporters were characterized (we’ve all seen the “Dumbfuckistan” meme plastered across the red states on the electoral map), voters recognized it was time to wrench unfettered power from political elites who continue to take-take-take from the little guy.  This was a “talk to the hand” moment: voters were no longer interested in shoring up the status quo just so the political class could continue to line their pockets and finance their government-dependent lackeys.

During the televised paroxysms and forecasts of doom and gloom on all media outlets—gradually whittling away at the skip in my step throughout the day–I wanted to slap these poor blubbering souls across the face a la Cher and say “Snap out of it!” No one has any intention of harming or locking up homosexuals.  But understand, in your zealousness for equality, you’ve been bullying the majority.

As I explained to a reporter from San Francisco Magazine who asked me how this could happen:  you cannot harass the majority of Americans for eight years, insult them as stupid, their beliefs as idiotic, and their views as intolerant, without rustling a good many feathers.  You cannot take away their jobs, clamp down on their first amendment freedoms, and dub them Islamophobes and racists, without incurring their ire.  You cannot divide them between straight and gay, male and female, young and old, black and white, employer and employee, union member and non-union member, 1% and 99%, 47% and 53%, bible-clinger and enlightened atheist, without creating division.  You cannot endlessly chide people as haters, without drastic repercussions.  Yet the Democrats have been doing this since taking the Congress in 2004.  They silenced the majority and drove them underground where they immured themselves in tight-knit communities and organizations laden with like-mindeds.

They were shut up, but did not shut down–and we can thank the Tea Party for that.

In a twist of history that would have the Founders spinning in their graves, we now live in an America where the rights of minorities have grown so powerful that they subordinate the rights of the majority.  “Imagine a boot stamping on a human face” when a handful of people can make decisions for all of us with the mere sweep of a pen or by judicial fiat.  Imagine that boot digging in even more when those in charge erase legislation duly enacted by the majority.  The left has alienated the majority of Americans by shaming and shunning them into compliance and using the fear of economic reprisal as a cudgel.

Any first year psychology student knows that people will be antagonized when the president, his Speaker and Majority Leader and the losing Democratic nominee call them tea baggers, Nazis, radical extremists, deplorables, irredeemables, and a host of isms and phobias.  Any student of history knows that admonishing Republicans to sit in the back of the bus, threatening to use a pen and a phone, and boasting about how winning entitles you to do whatever you want, does not win friends.

All of this is coursing through my bloodstream as I round the corner onto Fifth Avenue only to be re-routed by the barriers erected for the protests outside of Trump Tower.  By now, that skip in my step is more of a trudge. My euphoria is giving way to disappointment. Don’t give in to the crybabies and sore losers, I tell myself.  If you do, they win.

By the time I get home and read my email, my disappointment is morphing into rage.

One friend had been threatened in a neighborhood chat room; another had been completely shut out by fellow professors; a family member was told he owed every LGBTQ, black and Hispanic an apology for his vote and that their friendship was on hold.  Rants abounded on social media as did videos of young people ripping their hair out and wailing.  Reports quickly surfaced about students so disconsolate in school that they brought in therapy dogs; students in Oakland and Berkeley left school to protest-encouraged by teachers and administrators.  A young girl was beaten up in tony Woodside, CA, and a random white man by blacks, for exercising their right to vote.  A principal at a California high school assembled all the students in the football stadium and berated Trump with obscenities.  A friend’s relative cancelled a family reunion because she was too devastated by the election and needed therapy.

Watching the protesters was demoralizing—especially on a day that should have been ours to celebrate.  They couldn’t even give us our moment, I thought.  We let Obama have his day in the sun in Chicago surrounded by adoring fans and cardboard columns.  We rolled our eyes but did not counterattack when he prophesized about receding oceans and a cooling earth.  Another double standard.  When protesters called for people to die, the little that was left of my giddiness had completely evaporated.

Suddenly, the so-called oppressed have become the oppressors. I do not recognize this America.  It is symptomatic of pampered, entitled children living in a prosperous society, who have had few hardships, have always gotten their way, and are now having a major meltdown.  Their fantasy about life in America has been shattered and they don’t know how to process the fact that they have been fed a crap sandwich over the years by their teachers, social media, the culture, and the press.  They have been brainwashed to believe they can get anything they want at any time; that their wants and needs trump everyone else’s; that they can mold America in their image to the detriment of others; that the laws don’t count unless they craft them; that some people are more equal than others; and that they have a right to take what others work so hard to earn.

They do not exhibit any discerning intellectual thought independent of what the propaganda machine has dictated to them. They have yet to realize they are pawns in a sick political game.  I can only hope that one day they will realize the very people from the government, who tell them they are there to help, are really there to hold them back.

As the spring in my step devolved into me plopping in front of my computer, I came across Aaron Sorkin’s letter (of The Social Network and West Wing fame).  As if the day couldn’t get worse.

Sorkin rants about Trump supporters being Klansmen, White Supremacists, sexists, racists, buffoons, angry young white men, men who have no right to call themselves men, misogynistic shitheads, and haters.  He seems to think all Jews supported Hillary and all Jew haters supported Trump.  He seems to think the left needs to stand up, get involved, never take a day off, and fight injustice anywhere they see it.  He exhorts his kind to fight like hell for the next three years and win so that those in opposition will lose–this time for good.  He commits to “f’ing fight.”

Not only does he lump me and my Jewish family in with these epithets, but all of the wonderful conservatives I’ve met over the years—charitable, generous, and freedom loving people; individuals with an immense capacity to forgive; optimists; patriots who love all Americans; people who, if the left only deigned to talk to them would realize, don’t have a bigoted bone in their body; all of the LGBTQ people holding up signs at Trump rallies; all of our black, Hispanic, and Asian friends who supported this man.  We were the dregs of society, the worst that humankind has to offer.

My rage morphed into blind rage.  Now, I am livid.

What does this man think the left has been doing for the last century–certainly the last 36 years since Reagan ran? Has he been living under a rock or just in his Hollywood ivory tower, far removed from the plight of everyday Americans who have been suffering under the yoke of Obama’s progressive liberalism while his family, he admits, “is fairly insulated from the effects of a Trump presidency.”

And how is it we “lose for good”? Does he really think after eight hellacious years of Obama some new liberal in office would scare us into oblivion?  Or did he mean something more nefarious?  After all, calls to jail us, kill us, and assassinate our newly elected leaders are rampant.  Innocent people, whose only offense was voting for the “wrong” guy, have been mercilessly assaulted.  This, I tell my kombucha-drinking son who winces every time he walks past my Trump-Pence signs, is how the left responds; the vituperation and violence come from the left.  It always does.

Sorkin acts like the left has been asleep at the helm but the truth is they’ve spent the last 30+ years taking the very same political action he incites his readers to take, as if it had never been done before.

Mr. Sorkin. Your fellow travelers wrote the playbook on political warfare.  The left has had at its disposal a well-oiled machine that has absorbed–for its purposes only–what was supposed to be a robust, even-handed press.  You and your pals have used this powerful machine to your advantage in every election in every corner of the country.  It is only in the throes of defeat that you experience a sudden case of amnesia.  Your machine has assimilated millions, has stonewalled any resistance, and has promoted the fiction of enlightenment.

And yet, your day of reckoning has arrived and you don’t like it one bit.  Your iron curtain is on the verge of folding.  Your intellectual gulags will close.  Your agitprop has given way to perestroika and glasnost and you and your kind are having a collective nervous breakdown, coming completely unhinged.

Normally, I would relish watching you crumble, but a cornered animal is very dangerous.  I fear you more than you could ever fear me and the proof is: what have I done to you over the last eight years that remotely resembles what is being threatened now?  Opposing gay marriage and ObamaCare? Writing an informative letter to the editor?  Wanting more jobs and a secure America? Holding a flag at a Tea Party, singing God Bless America, then picking up the trash?

Here is the cold honest truth:  You lost because what you offer has been fully rejected by an overwhelming number of Americans.  You lost because your solutions are strangleholds on freedom for all Americans.  You lost because you are a member of an economically prosperous and influential class that seeks to lord over the masses; the people embrace your monetary success, but abhor your iron fist and imperiousness.  Your claim that “America didn’t stop being America [on election] night” is all wrong.  You lost because America stopped being America under Obama and the people in this country would not allow this to continue under Hillary.  America is reclaiming America, only you self-ascribed “Jewish, ‘coastal elites,’ educated, socially progressive, Hollywood” types are too dumb or too brainwashed or too insulated or too power-hungry to see it.

We know the calls for unity and open-mindedness were not genuine.  If they were, Our Dear Leader would be calling a press conference to quell the violence and hysteria. They can kick and scream all they want.  Short of an armed insurrection, nothing can change the results.

What we have is a hysterical gaggle of coddled teenagers and their hippie elders refusing to accept the outcome of a fair fight.  Well, you do not always get a trophy, you cannot always have a scoreless game, and you will not get a do-over.  For those of us who have had two year olds, we know how this goes:  red faces, prostate bodies, flailing arms, primal screaming, kicking, stomping, irrational babble–exactly what we see on the streets of urban America.  Eventually, it will die down.  We can only hope, one day, those in the Rebellion Against Trump will put on their big boy pants and grow up.

Sally Zelikovsky