We, the Compassionate Hypocrites

M. T. Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 11, 2016

I’m a Democrat, and like many of us, today I’m angry. I feel like I’ve been lied to, and betrayed by, the rest of my country. What I thought was a sure thing, what should have been a win for decency for my world view, was crushed. I’m angry, I’m sad, and I’ve been depressed for days. I feel like I’ve been personally wounded by the decision of my country-men and women to elect a person as vile as Donald Trump to be the President of the United States.

And I want to jump to the worst case scenario. When I realized what was happening on Tuesday, I could feel my adrenals squeezing. I have been in fight-or-flight mode for three days, and I want to scream, to run, to fight with all that I can the decision that was made by all of us. I felt like I already have fought, and I’ve lost. I’m frightened, and I want to be angry.

This is not my baseline. This is not how I see myself, and that in itself is almost as jarring as the punch in the gut that this election turned out to be. So I feel the need to step back; to be the person who I think I am; to be the person who I think I’ve always been: a compassionate person.

Compassion has been “easy” for the past few years. I thought I was compassionate about the people around me, my fellow citizens, those less fortunate, minorities, those of religions other than that of the majority in my country, the environment, endangered species — the list goes on. The one group that stands out to me as being void of my compassion is that of the “Right”, the conservatives, the Trump-supporters, those people who I’ve felt lacked compassion themselves and who I’ve relegated to having given up on their fellow citizens. It was easy to think “get over it, your party lost, and the world is going to be ok”. It was easy not to understand what the big deal was to them.

That’s where I went wrong. That’s where Democrats as a group went wrong.

I’m not saying that it was easy to be compassionate toward a group of people who could rally behind such a disgusting person. How could these people support such racism? How could these people support such ugly rhetoric? This is the exercise. This is the challenge. To look beyond the smokescreen of idiotic Trumipsms, and the dark hood that the KKK dressed them in, and actually ask “why”. We didn’t do that.

We didn’t see that it didn’t matter to them how awful Trump was because, to them, from their likely Fox News-laden perspective, our candidate was truly just as bad. For the past 25 years, the Right has known that Hillary Clinton was going to keep running for president until she could no longer physically bear the burden. An entire group of people have been taught to see her as evil, although from our perspective she was just another politician who had made a few mistakes, and who was infinitely better than Trump.

This was the sticking point. As Democrats we could not see anything from their perspective, and we forced a candidate onto the population that could not be elected. We laughed and laughed at these people, further alienating them. How could there possibly be so many people who could support this asshole when running against such a qualified candidate? There couldn’t be.

But when given a choice between two evils, the people chose the one that they hadn’t had bludgeoned into their heads for 25 years. The one who was anti-establishment. The one who had, despite the vulgarity, promised them a better future. Lots of people have hashed out why they wanted a better America. To them, they were forgotten in a changing world. It wasn’t ALL about the racism. It wasn’t all about the hate. It was about a chunk of the population that wants to make good by their families. A group that wants to make good by their God. A group who, for the last 8 years, had to live with our vision of the country rolling out before them. They had to watch their values wash away while we called them” backward”. They felt persecuted, while we, the godless, supported every other religion, even the ones whose members had tried to harm us. They felt in danger as cultures changed around them while they were being told that we were going to take their guns. While the cities made economic gains after the recession, the rural areas did not — why were they being left behind?

There are lots of reasons that they were scared. Their media lied to them; the echo chamber repeated it ad nauseam; their representatives and the media turned the fight personal and fought tooth and nail against every change; fear turned into hate. They took every bit of change personally, as a slight against them. They felt personally beaten down by us Democrats, by us liberals. And we didn’t care. They rallied behind someone who promised them to have “their America”, the “true America”, the only America that they understood and loved, back again.

And now they have a President who they think represents them, who promised the change they want: more jobs, a return to their values, and a reversion from all of the liberal change that has occurred over the past 8 years. And they have no compassion for us. Just like we didn’t have any for them when it was our turn to be bigger people. In a way, we deserve it.

We could have been more proactively compassionate toward these people instead of fighting everything they stood for. Explained ourselves better, instead of screaming and laughing. We could have educated and brought them along with us instead of leaving them behind with their “archaic, backward” ideas. But we rested on our laurels, sure that our next candidate would be elected, and let a demagogue appeal to them and appear more compassionate than us.

We are the party of compassion. Right?

We weren’t this time. We were hypocrites and it bit us in the ass. And now we have to live with the repercussions. We need to “get over it, our party lost, and everything’s going to be OK”. Now it’s our turn to deal with the implementation of their world view.

This doesn’t mean we have to bend to it. This doesn’t mean that we have to give up or compromise our view in any way.

It does mean that we have to stop looking for the easy answer: that these people are evil, that these people are as vile as the leader that sold them on the idea that he was their champion. We need to grow the fuck up. We need to look deeper, and more compassionately at their condition, at their grievances, and take them into account next time we nominate a candidate. We can’t fight half of our country. We need to include their lives, their hopes, their fears with ours, and start letting them know that we’re here for them, with them, and we’re all in this together.

Compassion — from the old Latin compati — to suffer with.

We’re all suffering in this country, for one reason or another. Instead of suffering because of one another, we all need to start suffering with one another.