<Desperately getting out some clothes that are a step up from the teeshirt and jeans... putting on lip liner and gloss> You don’t dress up shit, right? So if I almost look cute, if I put on my lacy top and some mascara, I’m not shit? Right? Please? Surely no one would dress up shit, so I must be okay. I’m okay. This is great.

Coming Together: My Attempts to Understand Trump Supporters

I have struggled to understand Trump supporters. I have been engaged in a personal battle of understanding since the surreal horror of watching the 2016 election results. Every time hateful, racist, misogynistic, and narcissistic words come out of his mouth or across his Twitter feed I feel like a game show hostess gracefully waving my hands in the direction of the ugliness. “Look at what you won! Enjoy your orange-painted lemon of a car.” But they do. They enjoy it. His supporters continue to take pride in Trump as president and I have been baffled. Since then I have made efforts to really understand why this is happening. I had to. After all, people that I consider to be of perfectly good character support him. I thought that either I had seriously misjudged some of those close to me or they had been completely fooled. Right or wrong. One or the other. No in-betweens. Either I was completely wrong or they were. But things are never so simple.

He says what he means. So this is one of the first phrases I get when I ask someone why they like Trump. He speaks his mind regardless of the consequences, they say. He doesn’t get all mealy-mouthed with platitudes or double talk. He is an everyman who is brave enough to speak his mind, and it’s high time America had someone who could just say what they mean. My Trump-supporting fellows are correct in that we do deserve honesty from our public officials and we have gone far too long without it. We have come to expect that our leadership can and will say one thing and do another. We take it for granted. I can completely understand how believing that we finally have a politician in office who speaks his mind honestly could feel like a breath of fresh air over rolling, stale fields of lies. But my Trump-supporting fellows are also so very, very wrong. Just because someone regularly says things so offensive that he obviously doesn’t care what anyone else thinks about it doesn’t mean that he is an honest person. It just means he is an offensive person. He has regularly and demonstrably lied to us and perhaps even to himself. The first thing he did upon taking office was to lie about how many people attended his inauguration. Of course, he also talked about how the rain held off just long enough for the cosmically important event of his inauguration to take place, so you are already taking anything out of his mouth as hyperbole at the very least. The two obvious lies I mentioned are just some of the first ones, and among the very innocuous. Others are much more harmful. The New York Times and other respected publications have written entire articles about how many times he has lied- what he has said, when he said it, and the proof against the various claims and statements. Yes, there are plenty of conspiracy theories, but even if you rightfully sweep those aside you are still left with an entire flaming dumpster filled with falsehoods.   Where we come together: Screw lies. We have the right and responsibility to hold our public officials to the highest levels of honesty.

He’s not a career politician and this makes him a man of the people. It is extremely appealing to believe that someone who represents us in government actually is one of us, that they have gone through the same problems and joys and understand all the details about our concerns and share them. But he’s not a man of the people. Unless you are in the 1%, you and Trump don’t come from the same place at all. Trump lives in the bubble of extreme wealth. Things that are practically a life and death matter for us don’t blip on his radar. They don’t have to. The safety buoy of his wealth floats him well above the thousands of things that concern us deeply and make up a good deal of our life’s work, struggle, and challenge. Even for a normally wealthy family, the difference in the life he leads and the life you lead are impossibly vast. He is only the “man of the people” for the tiniest and most sheltered percentage of the population. Where we come together: I think we all want people in office who represent us well and accurately, and that there is particular comfort in knowing that a representative has led a life similar enough to ours that they are going to hold some common beliefs and understandings. We should definitely be able to know that the people who represent us in government will actually represent us.

His good business sense will make America prosperous again. Trump has spoken a lot about making America more prosperous and bringing in more jobs. A promise to bring more jobs to our country can make us feel like we’re about to enter a lovely new era of wealth. A lot of people must look at the money that Trump has and believe that because he has that much money he must know how to make it. They may also make the assumption that because he has that much money he also wants you to have that much money and is about to make that happen. But Donald Trump does not want to make you rich. Donald Trump wants to make Donald Trump rich. Well, richer. Donald Trump also kind of wants to make some of his rich friends even richer, too, when that serves him. But he doesn’t care about making you rich. His policies thus far have helped companies be more corrupt, more harmful for the environment, and, yes, make more money- for a small percentage of people who actually own some of the businesses that are benefiting from various tax breaks and policy changes. None of those changes have made their way down to the rest of the population, and they won’t. It is going to stay in the pockets of CEOs, owners, and investors in major corporations. Because it is designed to. Also, he is a terrible businessman. At the very least he is a hit and miss businessman. He’s done well in some projects and failed horribly in many more. What he is good at is entertainment and branding. This is pretty ironic, since if you were to assign a brand to America he is very busy destroying that brand in the eyes of nearly every other country on the planet. So really, he’s not even doing branding well for us as president. But people sure are watching him. So he’s got that down, at least.

So in the end, we all pretty much want the same things. It doesn’t matter what political party we belong to, how much we make, or what our gender or personal beliefs are. We all want to be financially secure, to be empowered through good representation, and to be able to trust our leaders and, yes, our media. And I think both sides can even agree that all of these areas need some work. But all of that doesn’t quite answer why people support Trump. Not when each “good” reason has such evidence to the contrary. Not when his rhetoric is promoting racism, misogyny, and greed. Not while he angers and provokes multiple world powers and makes childish threats involving nuclear bombs. Not while he turns a blind eye to our environmental crisis. And not while he shows such disregard for basic human dignity. None of these are American values.

So I figured that the situation might be kind of like falling in love. No, really. We place expectations and beliefs on our sweethearts, especially early in a relationship. We may even miss a lot of who they really are as an individual at first because we see “lover”, and our minds apply to that person all of the qualities we are hoping for in a lover. Who hasn’t tried to tell a friend that the person they’re dating is oh-so-wrong for them? This is a thing we do, a thing so easy to do that we often have to consciously be careful not to. When we are lucky, time allows for us to see that person as they really are and we can slowly fall in love with each revealed facet of the individual. Or, you know, the opposite. And when we do find out that we’re wrong, we are sometimes still so caught up in who we wanted them to be that we will believe that they just… changed or that they weren’t the same person they were when we started the relationship, even though anyone else could say otherwise. So how hard would it be, really, to miss someone’s faults, even the glaring faults? We’ve all done it. And so I think some people listen to Trump and take what they are hoping for from it. This is also why I suspect that the greatest majority of people who support Trump are still the basically good people they were before the election. They are still people that I have a heck of a lot in common with, instead of some big mass of enemies that I need to get my fight on with.

Now anyone who is as upset about Trump’s actions as I am may be wondering why I’m being such an apologist for Trump supporters. I’m not. But I am much more in the mood to build bridges. We have far too much in common with most of them to do otherwise and I think it will do us much more good than bickering and finger pointing. He is benefiting from our broken social bonds. He is benefiting from our infighting, our side taking, and our anger, and I’m pretty done giving him that. This entire political farce has done us the favor of bringing to light a number of things we need to heal together. One example are those supporters of Trump who have an entirely different problem going on. I’m not so naive that I think every person who votes against human dignity or the Earth’s survival is just a little bit misled. Actual racists, bullies, and misogynists have been stirred from their hiding spots in the slimy muck and emboldened by Trump’s toxicity. These are not the people I’m talking about. These are the people that I think the average Trump supporter and the average “leebral” like myself can happily team up and stop. I think we can differentiate between people who are genuinely harmful and those with better intentions. And I also think we can step back from our own perspective enough to honor other people who actually are doing their best to be decent human beings and good Americans, and to move forward with them. And if they’re still managing to stay in the first flush of presidential romance with the Cheeto in Chief, even against our best girlfriend advice, I think we can be patient with them and help them out anyway. Because the crash from that kind of blinded romance is a harsh one, and we all still have a lot of work to do.

Medicaid and Community Engagement

Requiring someone to have a job to receive health care is barbaric. It is a ridiculous combination of Mean Girls meets the Keystone Cops with a dish of misanthropy on the side. We are better than this.

First, I want to mention what this proposed change is not:

It does not affect people who are elderly, minors, pregnant, disabled, or caregivers. These are the people who we usually think of when we consider Medicaid; these are our vulnerable. Luckily, they are not among those who will be affected. It also does not affect every state. Each state is bustling about right now deciding how to employ or to fight this Medicaid alteration.

Who does it affect, then? Everyone. It affects everyone. It affects you.

Specifically, and primarily, this course of action affects a group of people who are our hidden vulnerable. They are the ones that we blame for their own problems, the ones who are having trouble finding and holding a job, those who are struggling with addiction or mental illness, or people who are just caught in not-quite-actually-poverty limbo. There is not one, single defining feature for this part of the population other than their awkward super-power of not being counted among those in real need.

Instead of providing a living wage much of the work that doesn’t require an exorbitant college education, and plenty of the jobs that do, bring in just enough income to push a person out of the bracket for receiving various financial aids while still leaving them struggling. I don’t mean a struggle to get the latest cell phone. I mean juggling bills and not answering the unknown number on the phone because it could be a bill collector. I mean how many roommates can we legally cram into this place. I mean the people who put the last of their own food in their child’s lunch box when they send them to school, and the ones who can’t even manage that. Even though they work.

And that is exactly why some of them don’t work. Sometimes people can be in a situation where the only way to deal with the current backwards and bumbling system is to not work. If working means losing the thin safety line of government food and health programs, if it the difference between your kid getting lunch and going hungry, between having health care and relying on fervent prayer that it’s not strep, or appendicitis, or cancer, the choice to not work becomes extremely understandable.

But we don’t see it as understandable. The American Mythos, our pull yourself up by the bootstraps optimism, hasn’t been a real option for decades. Perhaps once all it took was perseverance. Not so much, today. “You don’t want to flip burgers when you grow up, do you?” “Do you want to end up working at the gas station?” Well, no. Not because the job lacks some basic dignity, but because you can’t live on it. It simply doesn’t pay a living wage, and that is an indignity. It is not the indignity of the person working, but of a system that keeps good work from providing fair and livable income.

There is the argument that the kind of jobs I just mentioned were meant for students. All of them? Really? Every single wait job at a restaurant, every job as a gas station attendant, every customer service position? I suspect we just don’t have that many people currently enrolled in college to account for the sheer number of employees needed for all these different positions. In the end, the minimum wage that could support a family in decades past is barely enough to eat on today thanks to inflation. Part time work seems tailor-made to be abused like this. Full time jobs should be more available. Also, a full-time job should support a family. It certainly used to. It might not get them a lot of luxuries but they should be able to feed their family. They should be able afford health care. But sometimes they can’t. Which brings us right back to-

The Medicaid proposal. No work, no health care. One route to not having a job is having to choose between the dignity of having said job and necessary food and health care assistance. Have one, lose the other- because the new program doesn’t seem to widen the range of what is considered poverty. So, limbo. The other two most common routes to joblessness would be addiction and mental illness. What that means for many people is that to get health care you must not be sick. I’m not even including the queue-the-circus-music dance of preexisting conditions. If you are already struggling with a condition that makes it difficult or impossible to get and hold a job and that condition has not been proved to be a legal disability, you won’t get health care. And neither addiction nor a huge swath of other crippling mental illnesses are disabilities. They are treated, essentially, as crimes.

And here is where the misogyny happens. There is a belief nurtured in our current society that people who can’t make it without help don’t deserve to. We are told it’s their fault; they are victims of their own laziness or stupidity. They have no one to blame but themselves. We are told that some people just don’t deserve help. And, if you parse all that language down to the essential, what we are being told is that some people deserve to suffer and die.

That sound a bit harsh, doesn’t it? It is not hyperbole. Any talk about who does and does not deserve access to health care is talk about who does and does not deserve to live. To widen the divide between have and have nots and then go out of your way to make sure that the lives of so many have nots are literally put in jeopardy by denying access to health care is monstrous. The language of any discussion about deserving health care hides the hideous truth of what is being said, and of what withholding health care means. For far too many people, it will mean death from preventable, curable health problems of all kinds. But hey, it’s just the crazy people, drug addicts, and idiots too stupid or lazy to buckle down and get a job, right?

Even if you are the hardest working, luckiest individual in the world and will never have to worry about your access to health care for a moment of your entire life, this affects you. This kind of careless, brutal apathy and shaming affects you. It subtly colors how you see other human beings, your ability to empathize. It changes the essentially pro-social creature that a human is into a craven idiot who believes that people must prove that they deserve to live. It is dystopia hidden in plain sight.

Those who made this proposal are careful with their words. A person must show Community Engagement to “earn” health care. So, a few hours at the local soup kitchen or some other simple community engagement will get them health care. That sounds easy enough. But if someone is impaired enough that they can’t hold a job, or if they are dancing the edge of utter poverty, they aren’t going to have an easier time doing a job for no pay. And it is not going to change the fact that the wage gap is obscene. It still doesn’t fix the essential problems.

The word engagement can be easily and accurately replaced with service in the Community Engagement proposal. Community service. As in what you sometimes get in lieu of jail time when you have committed a crime. But having a mental disorder or choosing between impossible options is not a crime. We should not force people into community service just to prove that they have the right to live. We are better than that. We need to be better than that.

The right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are Constitutional rights. You can say that pursuit of happiness is a bit of a nebulous phrase, but essentially it means we shouldn’t institutionalize and perpetuate suffering. Most of the rest of that pursuit is greatly up to the individual. For freedom, the worn out but terribly accurate phrase is that that the range of your personal freedom ends where your neighbor’s nose begins. It can be a delicate balance. But the right to life is, in this topic, simpler. We don’t have to prove that we deserve to live. It is a Constitutional right. Denying health care is denying people access to what they need to protect their health and their lives.

Now how about some actual Community Engagement?