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vendredi 19 mai 2017

My Mother the Trump Voter

The following post was originally featured on Medium.

My mother once started a union at her work. After her employer attempted to demote her out of a personal vendetta, she started talking to other employees in the bathroom and got in touch with a professional union organizer who helped them form their chapter.

Her workplace spent 4 years and $100k fighting it, and they made her life hell. She'd come home after work and puke, and she developed an ulcer. She used to call me, sometimes in tears, saying she wished she had never started this thing at all. I told her she was right, they were wrong, and the worse they treated her, the more justified and necessary her cause was. Ultimately she won, and enjoys union benefits to this very day.

Once when we were on the phone talking about Scott f*cking Walker and his decimation of unions, she said she supported what he was doing. Turns out unions are fine for her, but not for other people.

And she voted for Trump.

My mother the Trump voter damn near died in 1971 when her f*cking doctor would not remove a dead fetus from her because, and I quote: "I'm Catholic and I wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole."

My mother the Trump voter loves me. More relevantly, she is the center of my little daughter's world. My daughter knows her parents voted for Hillary, and Grandma voted for Trump, but we don't talk about it in front of her. Or at all, ever. In this I am lucky; not everyone's family is able to abide by the traditional midwestern code of nice-people-don't-argue. I save my voice for others who need it: Raise your voice! Resist! This is an outrage! Look at what they've done, not just to a good woman, but to all of us! We're all in danger - don't stay silent!

If it would help the cause to burn my relationship with my mother to the f*cking ground, if it would do any good at all to turn our visits into yelling matches, I would not hesitate. But it won't. So we have pleasant chats about cooking and shopping and family happenings, and we pretend everything is fine.

I used to have dinner and watch the news with my mother the Trump voter, and we'd talk about how awful George W. Bush was. "I hate the thing he does with his hands," she'd say, imitating the thing he always did with his hands. But after September 11, 2001, suddenly we couldn't talk about how awful George W. Bush was anymore. Suddenly Fox News was on both TVs in my parents' house all the time. Suddenly everything changed, and my mother the Trump voter wasn't the mom I'd known anymore.

When she talked about "the immigrants" and what a threat they were, I reminded her that one of my closest friends and his wife were both immigrants. Her expression softened: "Oh, Tony and Lucy are different; I've been meaning to call them to invite them for dinner on Sunday. Will you mention it next time you see them?"

Throughout 2016, I occasionally mentioned that my mother planned to vote for Trump. What followed was always the same:

Them: Oh my God! Is there any way you can . . .
Me: NOPE.
Them: Isn't there any way you can . . .
Me: Uh-uh. I went down that road with W, and I am not going down it again.
Them: But maybe if you just . . .
Me: ……………………

I think about my mother and Hillary Clinton a lot. Both women are the same age, with similar hairstyles. Both have sharp minds and big hearts. Both are from similar backgrounds, but took their lives in vastly different directions.

My mother the Trump voter loves to watch hour after hour of World War II documentaries. Her father was stationed in the Pacific theater, but her fascination lies with Hitler's domination of Europe. She sits before the grainy, scrolling images with tears in her eyes. "Horrible," she says. "People don't understand just how horrible it was." There's no telling her that Breitbart and Drudge and other websites bookmarked on her laptop are run by white supremacists. She dismisses this with the same impatience good citizens of the Reich brushed off reports of the concentration camps as "Allied propaganda."

I miss the mother I used to have. But then I wonder if this thing was in her even all those years ago - before Fox News, before 9/11, before Trump - just waiting to come out.

One of the reasons my daughter loves Hillary Clinton is because she thinks she looks like my mother. In this she is not wrong. Once this was inadvertently spoken aloud, and I braced myself for the blowback. Instead my mom said, "I don't mind. I think she's pretty."

A five-year-old's political views come from the adults around her, of course. She doesn't understand any of this beyond an immediate emotional level. One day she might remember her mother crying for days after the election, or she might not. For her this will be something in her history textbooks, but the fallout from this chapter will shape her formative years, as Watergate did mine. Often I wish I could just skip ahead a few chapters, say to 15 years from now, when the enormity of what was done not just to Hillary Clinton but to all of us will have settled in. Right now the wound is too raw.

I see Democrats - men and women - backing away from Hillary Clinton, hands in the air. "She was a weak candidate. She ran a bad campaign. She should have done this or not done that, been more this or less that. It's her fault. Let us bury her and never speak of her again. The next candidate will be perfect. Next time will be perfect. Next time."

Men like Trump and Sanders have the luxury of blaming others for their losses to her. Our final insult to her is to demand that she shoulder the burden of blame for gerrymandering, voter suppression, a 25-year misogynist smear campaign, a domestic conspiracy within our own institutions, and interference by a hostile foreign power. She must "accept responsibility." She should have smiled more.

"You're being emotional about it," opponents sneer at us, and we hasten to justify, no, no we're not, it's just, you know, the fabric of the republic threatens to be ripped asunder by an injustice of this magnitude and stuff. But also I'm going to go ahead and be emotional about Hillary Clinton. She is the mom I wish I had, with all of my mother's best traits - her kindness, her compassion, her generosity and fighting spirit - and a worldview a lot more aligned with my own. I suspect I'm as much a disappointment to my mom (in terms of politics) as she is to me. Yet what choice do we have but to love each other?

Even though my mom will never understand this, the qualities I love most about her are the very same ones I love most in Hillary: she has been told to sit down and shut the f*ck up more than any woman in modern history, and she never does. The monstrosities inflicted upon her have bent but not broken her. She loves us despite how horrible we've been to her. I can't think of anything that better encapsulates motherhood than that. They're not so different after all.

Hillary wants us to keep fighting - "America is worth it." So I will keep fighting, for her. And for my daughter. And - even though she'll never understand - for my mom too.

Dr. Val Perry Rendel, everyone's favorite foulmouthed rhetorician, is real whether you believe in her or not. If you want her book (Bust: Bernie's 30-Year Plan to Destroy the Democrats) to be available in time for 2018 midterms, help build her platform by liking her author page on Facebook and following her on the Twitter: @WorstPrezEver29 .

vendredi 19 mai 2017