The Angels of Our Better Nature Are a Lesson Away
I managed to avoid watching or listening to a single speech by Donald J. Trump in all four years of his presidency.
I never watched George W. Bush give a speech but clamored to hear every word spoken by Barack Obama.
On the morning of January 20, 2021 I finally watched Trump give his farewell speech as the plane was set to dispatch he and his family of plastic creatures off to Florida (really the only place I can think of fitting with its cadre of septuagenarians and shirtless idiots).
It was exactly as I thought it would be.
Did we learn anything from him or at least from the now very real possibility of him?
It turns out that 74 percent of the online conflicts on Reddit were instigated by one percent of the users.
Out of 900,000 active police officers employed in the United States, roughly 1,000 are involved in situations that result in the death of civilians. That's O.1 percent of police who use their authority and kill others.
One percent of the population of the country is responsible for 63 percent of all violent crime.
A new paper suggests that between 5 and 20 percent of people account for most overt acts of racism.
Reframing it a second and it looks like the vast majority of people are not engaged in conflict, violence, and overt racism in the country.
At one point as the Bar and Slots Manager in the casino, I noticed a policy that our servers could comp out almost every drink and liquor imaginable except for Red Bull. No matter how high-level the guest, Red Bull was off the menu unless they paid for it.
I never thought too much about it but one afternoon I asked the swing shift bartender why we made that exception.
"Oh. We had a manager a few years ago who was comping Red Bulls out for himself every day. The GM just decided to eliminate Red Bulls altogether after that."
"Punish everyone for the grift of one guy? That's a little shortsighted."
"Yeah. But what're you gonna do?" and she shrugged.
I put Red Bull back on the comp list. That's what I did. The assholery of one dude should not dictate the policy of the place.
Trump was one dude. One toxic, broken man with a big mouth, a pathological need to trumpet himself out of sheer low self-esteem, and the money given to him from his far more ruthless and intelligent mega-racist father.
For a host of reasons, some obviously anti-social and representing the worst among us but some logical and perhaps reactionary, seventy-five million Americans voted for him to continue his reign of incompetence for another four years. Most of that number are not Wear-a-Viking-Helmet-Shirtless-Assholes. Most are your neighbors. I don’t understand why they voted that way but to reduce them down to an image of a militia-wannabe with a Confederate flag is no better than the diminution of the #BLM movement to the picture of some asshole torching a CVS.
There are a lot of assholes out there but a lot more who are not assholes. You know what an asshole is: he's been our president for four years.
An asshole:
Shouts you down
Makes up facts
Calls people demeaning names
Lacks specifics
Is more concerned with ego than cooperation
Requires loyalty
Does everything in his power to cancel others who disagree with him
The best thing I can imagine anyone doing in the wake of Trump leaving the Oval Office is to simply not behave in any way like him.
He used social media as a weapon. Don't do that.
He positioned his every argument as an emotional hot button. Don't do that.
He was often irrational and unapologetic. Don't be irrational and try to display some level of humility.
According to my former staff at the casino, I am an excellent manager. As much as I'd love to embrace that as somehow my natural inclinations and abilities, I can't. I've learned from some extraordinary bosses over my many avenues to income, from Sharon Hayes (my first school principal) to Daniel Ash (my boss at WBEZ) to Jeffrey Smith (the General Manager of the casino).
I've also learned from a few terrible managers and, in some ways, those lessons were even more valuable than the positive examples.
I believe that each of us is a sum total of the many people we encounter. I am parts of my grandfather, my mom, my wife. I am also parts of my domestic abusing first stepfather, the bullies in high school, and the manager who went out of her way to take credit for my work while complaining that I was incompetent.
Like the above statistics, the vast plurality of people in my life, summed up as they are in synthesis in my character, have been non-assholes. Most have been decent humans doing the best they can with a loaded deck and fewer chips than they would like at the felt.
So what do we learn from four years of the Orange Goblin?
The worst of us will be exactly like him.
The best of us will do our damnedest to be as far from like him as humanly possible.
