I was a lot smarter in 1972 than I am now, or have been in the intervening decades.\u00a0 Trump’s presidency proved it.<\/p>\n
The Virginian<\/b><\/p>\n
The company I worked for back then was headquartered in Richmond Virginia.\u00a0 I had moved to Virginia to join them.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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”.<\/p>\n
The Confederate Flag<\/b><\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And so a colleague asked me in my first year in Southern California which was more prejudiced, Virginia or California?<\/p>\n
Liberal Los Angeles<\/b><\/p>\n
I saw Southern California as being horribly segregated.\u00a0 It was easy to see the distinct lines between white and black communities.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Everyone understood which were the Black cities and which were therefore dangerous for whites. Does the whole world recognize “Compton”?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 California had a better fa\u00e7ade, but the veneer was thin.\u00a0 Discrimination and hate speech were not as publicly obvious, but they were there just the same.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
My Answer in 1972<\/b><\/p>\n
So my answer to my colleague was that Virginia and California were equally bad.\u00a0 In Virginia it was acceptable to be openly bigoted, in California you just had to be better at hiding it.\u00a0 I was smart then.\u00a0 Sometime in between, I grew stupid, or at best delusional.<\/p>\n
A Better Place<\/b><\/p>\n
In the decades since, I became convinced the US was becoming a better place.\u00a0 I became convinced we were maturing into a better society in which we valued and respected civil rights.\u00a0 Women were more respected, Blacks were more respected, Gays were more respected.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Diversity, empowerment and inclusion were popping up everywhere.\u00a0 It seemed we had hit a critical mass of societal and cultural civility.<\/p>\n
Then Obama Got Elected<\/b><\/p>\n
And we devolved right back to fighting the Civil War again, or yet.<\/p>\n
And in one of the greatest pendulum swings imaginable, we then elected Trump. No more veneer, no more fa\u00e7ade, we showed our true vile selves as a nation.<\/p>\n
But Wait <\/b><\/p>\n
I gave the 2016 Trump supporters the benefit of the doubt.\u00a0 In spite of what appeared to be overwhelming evidence, they must not have known who\u00a0 and what he was!\u00a0 Or maybe they were just voting against Clinton? Surely America isn’t this bad?!<\/p>\n
But then 75,000,000 people voted for him again<\/i> in 2020.\u00a0 There is no longer any doubt.\u00a0 We are the same bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic nation we have always been.\u00a0 Nothing has changed.\u00a0 Nothing got better.\u00a0 We just got better at hiding it, for a time.<\/p>\n
I was smart in 1972.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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