To Unfriend or Not

30 March 2020

I was reading a friend's note about unfriending a rabid Always Trumper.  I started this in a Facebook post but decided it really is better as a blog post. 

The problem for my liberal friends with unfriending a Trumper on Facebook, is that we cannot self-isolate politically. It is hard, so very hard, to stomach the subtle and not so subtle, racist, classist and sexist agendas of Trump and the people who have opted to to fully embrace him. But if we give up on talking to pro-Trump acquaintances will our limiting our base for the next election.  If we simply ignore the marginal Trump supporters his breed of hatred and manipulation will continue to win. 

When we lose or fail at something, or when something we value and have worked for becomes unobtainable, we look for someone to blame. Over the past decades very bad choices have been made by the people we, a majority of us, have picked to lead our nation.  Regan’s pushing America toward being a service economy nation was foolhardy.  Who buys something if they are not making the wages a job manufacturing something brings? Clinton’s choice to embrace NAFTA destroyed the middle-class core of nation.  Those good paying jobs making cars and washing machines, they went south to Mexico or across the Pacific to Asia at a fraction of the labor cost.

With such choices being made we have an entire generation whose opportunities to live a middle-class life have disappeared. You don’t get a good apartment in the city or a house in the suburbs floating on the gig economy. If you came into the manufacturing workforce in the 1970s and early 1980s, those secure jobs you thought you had for life, well they went poof.  When they disappeared and you took half pay for a year to disassemble the paper mill or the auto plant for a fixed term of months, your mortgage wasn’t met and the kids couldn’t afford to go to even the safe state university.

In an environment of deprivation demagogues arise. They play on people’s anger and blame immigrants, those racist and thieves, for job losses and stagnant wages. They use code to exploit long extant racial divides.  No, they don’t have to call people wetbacks or ni**ers out loud, they just have to use dog whistle terms about lifetime welfare families, laziness and tropes about people who won’t learn our language. 

Demagogues don’t highlight the tax law and other legal changes that enhance and entrench the positions of those of great, almost unheard-of means. Trump and the people he surrounds himself with don’t talk about the people on the boards of corporations who voted unanimously to shift jobs to just south of our border with Mexico or to relocate the manufacture of washing machines to areas paying slave wages.

And Trump’s posse are doing this with regard to even the current global health crisis.  Just look at the falderol over the name of the pandemic.  Just because we used country names in the past for diseases doesn’t mean we should do so today. In the past we were more openly racist and jingoistic than we are, or should be, today.  Demonizing a country because a disease’s genesis occurred there does nobody any good, Clearly, we weren’t the ones who started this practice, I believe the English referred to either gonorrhea or syphilis as the “French” disease. But it is counterproductive in a world that is much more closely wired together than it ever was before to do so today. 

Trump calling the pandemic the Chinese Flu or Wuhan Flu, is not because the name is being used as a geographic origin indicator, not really.  Calling it the Chinese Flu is nothing but what linguists call using a devil word, in modern terms it is called using a dog whistle.  President Trump clearly has issues with China, some of them valid. Not all of them are, but some of them are. But intertwining this dread scourge of a disease with the name of China doesn’t help fight the virus, doesn’t help save lives and doesn’t do a damn thing that is positive. It will not end abusive Chinese trade practices.

What calling this the Chinese or Wuhan Flu does do is to support the President’s narrative that China is the source of a wide array of problems in our country.  And as pointed out above many of these, if not most of these, were of our own making!

If we walk away from people who buy into this malarkey, we allow them to infect others with this pointless hating agenda.  We have to step up and say the things that need to be said.  We have to say the Chinese lab didn’t release coronavirus into the world.  We have to say it isn’t okay to non-consensually grab women by their genitals. We have to say it wasn’t illegals who stole your jobs, because a. you wouldn’t want the jobs that are taking for the wages they are accepting and b. the jobs you want were stolen away by the minutes of a unanimous board of directors of Westinghouse or GM or about any other corporate concern you can name.  And you have to tell them their then Senator and House member said okay to this.

We have to be there using logical argument in the face of emotional slogans and shallow talking points.  We have to point out a way for positive change. It is okay to silence or unfriend someone who just endlessly spews this vile nasty stuff.  But the folks who say, “Yeah,” or “Me too,” or simply like this venomous and putrid evil, it is those folks we have to focus on and engage with.  They may be people who can be educated.  If we hide our heads in the sand this madness does not end.