The rest of this post is mostly political. I do not know when I will be updating the blog again, but wanted to acknowledge it had been some time before I launched into my spiel. If you are here mostly for the painting or gaming then this might be where you want to stop reading.
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I attended two High Schools, four Middle Schools (while missing half a year during that time), and more Elementary Schools than I can remember. I know I went to at least three private schools, some schools of mixed ethnicity, some purely Caucasian, and at least one school where the student body was just over 80% African American. I never really was anywhere long enough growing up until that second High School to really think of any single place as home, but it did give me a lot of opportunities to see how different schools operate. At least from the perspective of a student.
That second High School is the place I think of when I hear the word “Home”. Most people from there move away as adults. There are some people I admire there, but there is a truly ugly side. I lived there in the nineties. “Rolling Fags” had nothing to do with cigarettes. There were some that invited me to join them when they were bored, but it was something that meant leaving the county so I thankfully did not have to look for excuses to not participate very often. I knew people that tortured animals. Some from boredom, but at least one because he hated cats and got his start as a young child.
I failed to notice there were no minorities in the school until one kid gave a class report while wearing the robes and hood. I do not remember what the report was on as I was too busy shitting bricks at the time. Up until this point most of the schools were teaching us to be “Colorblind”. Even the school that was 80% African American was peddling it in the eighties. There was less hate there than some of the schools I had attended. There was a couple of kids that made certain I knew I was a minority, but it was no worse than teasing I received in other schools and I was able to leave it at school. I got a small taste, but it was not something I had to live with for the rest of my life. Being Colorblind seemed like a good concept at the time. I have come to since think of Colorblind as merely being blind to the issues as it can only truly work if there are no hate crimes. Otherwise it doubles as a means to not see what is going on.
It was safe to have people know your were a member of the Klan back home even though it was not something openly discussed. The Klan moved into the area to oppose the Catholic church after all so was not considered a hate group by many in the area even though moving to a place to suppress the beliefs of others is exactly what a hate group does. Most of the members in the area were part of the Klan because their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents were. For them it was as natural as being the same member of a church your parents are members of and you were raised in. Many were not directly racist. Then again, they had little to no opportunity to be directly racist. Klan members were a minority of the population, but they operated largely unopposed. Nobody spoke out against them. One does not have to be a member of the Klan to tolerate their activities. Then again, they functioned more like a local Lodge and were not breaking any laws so were easy to ignore.
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I share this partly to help explain why I was not shocked by Trump’s win on Tuesday. I do not watch a lot of television, but I am online and know people from various places. I was seeing a lot of support for both candidates. It is also hard to be surprised after seeing Trump succeed in spite of every expectation of failure through the primaries and all the way up to election night along with knowing how fear of other humans can influence us.
Trump's promises concerning minority various groups that were not his target demographic were well known. This was before Mike Pence was named his running mate and carried over the course of his campaign. Voting for Trump does not mean that a person is racist or any number of hateful traits that can be attributed to a person. It does however mean that person either does not believe what Trump says, or are willing to overlook racism and homophobia. That is why accusations are leveled against Trump supporters. Hate crimes were just acknowledged as acceptable even if not directly participating in them. There were other reasons to vote for Trump. The message received is that those reasons are good enough to trivialize the rights and safety of some citizens.
I understand the appeal to want to break the system. Many Americans have lost faith in the system. I don’t see how anybody believed an elitist that farms production jobs out to other countries was going to change the system, but I understand the desire for changing how things are even if it comes down to not caring what form that change takes. The reports we are getting right now has his cabinet filling up with career politicians who were already very much part of that very establishment.
As of right now, I have more respect for the KKK and the Westboro Baptist Church than the people that acknowledge Trump as not qualified to be President but were essentially triggered into voting for Trump because they were tired of being called something they do not see themselves as. This feeling of low regard also extends to those that are literally shifting the responsibility of their decision to vote for Trump to others. Both present themselves as victims with no choice but to vote for Trump.
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For me there are some directly personal reasons for my feelings. Even though I am a straight white male in my thirties I can not claim that my reasons for wanting to preserve the rights of others are purely selfless. Yes, I believe in equality. True equality would benefit all people except for those in truly exulted positions of society in the long run. There is also the issue of safety.
My home county experienced an HIV outbreak this year. My youngest sibling just graduated from the same High School I attended. There was no Planned Parenthood due to funding cutbacks at the state level thanks in no small part to our recently elected Vice President. This made the virus harder to track and contain.
There was talk about real change in the area. People who had been living their lives and putting up with what was around them started to speak up. Then the police declared they had arrested everyone involved with one particular drug line into the county. The county fair was just after that and life went on. The only mention I have seen from anybody concerning it at all since the arrests was when one woman accused another of stealing her boyfriend over facebook and claimed the other woman had Aids in the process. Other than that, online it was like it had never happened.
Numbers I have say that 9.1 K votes were counted for my home county. Of those, 67.04% (Around 6,100) voted for Trump. This means two thirds of the voters in a county directly threatened by HIV because of Pence’s policies were okay with him being Vice President. This makes me feel so many things I do not know what to express.
Obama is my President. Bush was my President. Before him my Presidents were Clinton, Bush, Regan, and Carter. Trump will be my President as well. This is my country. I have lived in most of its states at some point during my lifetime. This may not be the circumstances I would have chosen for my country, but it is the place we find ourselves in. I wish for the best for my planet and its inhabitants.
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