How Sad & Shameful & A Call To Fight For Justice

October 14, 2017

Guest blogger: Gary Peck. Dr. Peck is a longtime civil rights advocate in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I am not a huge fan of the Clintons, and I never have been. We could talk for days about the pros and cons of Hillary, who has her virtues and who I’m not repulsed by the way I am her husband. But this much I know in my own heart and soul to be true. Anyone who applied an ideological purity test and voted for someone else in November, or who sat things out, was acting in a manner that reflected a maddening hubris or a thorough misunderstanding about precisely what we were dealing with in an election when so much was at stake for so many people. For all of us, really.

Trump’s most recent abhorrent actions — threatening to abandon Puerto Ricans, undermining the ACA by ending subsidies and permitting the sale of empty insurance policies, demanding draconian immigration policies and laws in exchange for modest DACA protections, starting the death spiral of the Iran deal — will literally kill people and destroy the lives of others. And these are just the most recent instances of Trump’s cravenness that has been the hallmark of his “administration.”

I do not have much patience when it comes to those who share the blame for what is now happening. That includes the vaunted “white working-class” we are supposed to excuse, because they have suffered economic hardships that led so many of them last November to support a candidate who by all indications appeared to be a racially biased, sexist, authoritarian, religiously intolerant, inept, entitled, xenophobic, narcissistic, know-nothing, anti-science, homophobic, cheating, lying bully. To my mind, excusing them is condescending, patronizing, and wrong.

Too many of us have worked in too many low-income and poor communities of every color, every religion, every gender, sex, and sexual orientation, where decent people of good will rejected the hate, embraced each other, and fought together for progressive causes to now uncritically buy into the new conventional wisdom about how best to advance an anti-racist, anti-homophobic, pro-women, pro-worker, and pro-immigrant agenda. The answer is most definitely not to turn a blind eye to the resentments that were clearly a part of the 2016 electoral mix and to be apologists for all of those who helped to elect a president whose values and politics are anathema to common decency.

I, for one, am not surprised at any of it, and I said so throughout the campaign. I thought HRC would win, and I voted for her without hesitation. I knew come November she was the only viable opposition to Trump, and there were people who would suffer in the unlikely event she lost. And I was keenly aware her loss was not beyond the realm of what was possible. I was, and I still am, convinced the bigotry that is deeply insinuated in our history remains a cancer that’s endemic to who “we” are as a nation. It was — despite denials to the contrary — a significant factor that helps to explain Trump’s ascension, victory, and ongoing support among a broader swath of the population than the polls are ever likely to fully capture.

And where are we now? “A Better Deal”? Really? Tom Perez and Chuck Schumer and Kamela Harris and Cory Booker? With supposed sages like Bill and Hillary and Barack to show us the way forward? Honestly, even Bernie is less than advertised when he insists on the primacy of class and relegates race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, and the rest of our defining identities to something less important than purportedly more fundamental economic bases of inequality and injustice. It is sad, and it begs for resistances that are organic and localized and aimed at inspiring pushback that is grounded in the rich complexity of life and isn’t exclusively consumed with what the federal government does, however important all of the D.C. machinations might be.

Yes, what happens in Washington matters. But it’s not the only thing that counts. Not hardly. As for the obstinacy of the Jill Steins, Susan Sarandons, and Bernie supporters of the world, who steadfastly refused to align with an imperfect candidate whose victory would certainly have spared millions of people the very real suffering they are predictably experiencing in the ugly era of Trump, I will pass now just as I passed when it most mattered. Their stance and that of their enablers, whose intransigence I’m sure was part of how we have ended up where we are, was shamefully unhelpful no matter their good intentions.

Whatever other forces were at play, it’s going to take me some time to get over that, and I am one of the lucky ones who isn’t going to be crushed the way some of our more vulnerable brothers and sisters will be. Meanwhile, I will join with all those resistors whose tenacity is rooted in the everyday and who refuse to give up.