Note: I know I shared A LOT yesterday about how frightened I am by a Trump presidency and the social progress and civil liberties I'm afraid for. I still feel all that. But last night a friend who voted for Trump put an image on Facebook of a Trump and Clinton supporter holding hands and basically saying, 'Can we still be friends?'
I don't want to become hateful because I'm afraid of a hateful president. My Trump supporting friend is a good mother, a kind co-worker and one of the funniest people I've ever met. She's supported my activism and women who work and is a good person.
So I'm trying to understand what I don't actually yet understand about how Trump was so appealing. I will need to talk to people who actually supported Trump and not just the media headlines. And to keep learning more as well. So I'm sharing an article two of my other friends shared on Facebook last night. One of them, I met at college and we were in a working-class support group for kids who were the first in the family to go to college.
Here is the start of the article:
My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment.
He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part-time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in 1970, many blue-collar whites followed his example. This week, their candidate won the presidency.
For the full article, go here.
P.S. Here is a link which also talks a lot about class written by Michael Moore who predicted Donald Trump would win.
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