I was a lot smarter in 1972 than I am now, or have been in the intervening decades.  Trump’s presidency proved it.

The Virginian

The company I worked for back then was headquartered in Richmond Virginia.  I had moved to Virginia to join them.  After three years, they moved me to Southern California. Transplants from the “Home Office” were rare and it made me a bit of a celebrity among my peers.  While my time in Virginia had been short, and I had lived in three other states before California, I was known as being “from Virginia”.

The Confederate Flag

Richmond, having been the capital of the Confederacy among other telling characteristics, had successfully maintained its reputation as being a bigoted city in an equally bigoted state.

And so a colleague asked me in my first year in Southern California which was more prejudiced, Virginia or California?

Liberal Los Angeles

I saw Southern California as being horribly segregated.  It was easy to see the distinct lines between white and black communities.  The city where I bought my first house had outlawed overt housing discrimination less than 10 years earlier, but was maintaining its whites-only housing policy in other ways.  Everyone understood which were the Black cities and which were therefore dangerous for whites. Does the whole world recognize “Compton”?  California may have be seen as being more liberal than Virginia, but what I saw was that the level of bigotry and prejudice was same between the two states.  California had a better façade, but the veneer was thin.  Discrimination and hate speech were not as publicly obvious, but they were there just the same.  All it took was an all-white gathering to know that the California attitudes were as ugly as ever, but there was a tacit understanding that it was best to hide, at least to some degree, your true nature.

My Answer in 1972

So my answer to my colleague was that Virginia and California were equally bad.  In Virginia it was acceptable to be openly bigoted, in California you just had to be better at hiding it.  I was smart then.  Sometime in between, I grew stupid, or at best delusional.

A Better Place

In the decades since, I became convinced the US was becoming a better place.  I became convinced we were maturing into a better society in which we valued and respected civil rights.  Women were more respected, Blacks were more respected, Gays were more respected.  Rarely were we hearing the voices of bigotry and white supremacy, and when we did they were marginalized and ridiculed appropriately. Progress was being made.  Diversity, empowerment and inclusion were popping up everywhere.  It seemed we had hit a critical mass of societal and cultural civility.

Then Obama Got Elected

And we devolved right back to fighting the Civil War again, or yet.

And in one of the greatest pendulum swings imaginable, we then elected Trump. No more veneer, no more façade, we showed our true vile selves as a nation.

But Wait

I gave the 2016 Trump supporters the benefit of the doubt.  In spite of what appeared to be overwhelming evidence, they must not have known who  and what he was!  Or maybe they were just voting against Clinton? Surely America isn’t this bad?!

But then 75,000,000 people voted for him again in 2020.  There is no longer any doubt.  We are the same bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic nation we have always been.  Nothing has changed.  Nothing got better.  We just got better at hiding it, for a time.

I was smart in 1972.