An acquaintance posted something on Facebook today that kind of made me throw up in my mouth. “People don’t understand the rage that Trump supporters feel.”
So, let’s talk about rage. I grew up with Watergate and
Vietnam on the news every evening. I grew up in the world of the draft and Kent
State, a world where women weren’t allowed to run marathons or have their own
credit cards. During high school, I watched Reagan destroy our economy, laugh at the AIDS epidemic,
and violate federal and international law with impunity. I watched my beloved
home state turn into a third world country of pollution, poor education, and
unregulated corporate greed. I walked the streets of San Francisco in the 80s
where men like living skeletons marked the days until their inevitable deaths. I’ve watched my friends get beat up and thrown
to the ground for the crime of speaking or sitting. I’ve marched with women who
have lost their children to the violence of racism, and had cops point rifles
at my head for it. I’ve been denied jobs, promotions, and opportunities because
I’m female. So yes, I do know about rage. But anger isn’t always destructive,
in spite of what the self-appointed gurus tell us. My rage is for the
disenfranchised, for the creatures of the earth denied the chance to live in
joy, peace, and prosperity because of human greed. My anger drives me to activism, to liberalism, to compassion.
If this was your anger, you’d get involved. You’d vote for
someone who cares, who has a plan to right some of these wrongs. But your anger
is not this. Your anger is the same rage that drives a jilted man to murder his
wife or girlfriend. Your anger is the same rage that causes a toddler to smash
the toy he’s been told to share. Your anger is the rage of privilege denied.
Yes, I get it. You were supposed to get a great ride in this life. It was
supposed to be awesome. You were supposed to rule the world. Or, at least, live
some kind of James Bond fantasy of women, adventure, and wealth. But from your
stand-up desk in the financial district, you can see the beginning of the end of
the patriarchy. People abandoning the church. Women college graduates
outnumbering men. Blacks marching in every city demanding justice. The
legalization of gay marriage. The legalization of marijuana. Grandmothers
chaining themselves to pipelines. But, even if human civilization would
continue to endure patriarchy’s toxic legacy, nature herself will not. She is
in a burning rage, and business as usual will not appease her. You can blame
this on my generation, just as I could equally well blame it on my parents’
generation. We would both be right, and it wouldn’t matter. Civilization is
just beginning, or just ending, or maybe both, and you’re scared as shit.
So, you’re going to
vote for Trump. Because you want to go out in a blaze of glory maybe? I
guarantee that didn’t work so well for the Third Reich, and it won’t work
well for you either. You’re just a very small pawn in the game, after all, no
matter how your gonads ache for greatness. You could devote what’s left of your
insignificant life to solving problems and bettering the world, or you could
just grab what you can with your fat white hands and scream for more.
