Happy New Year

See you in a few days.

The American Dream

Over the last two years, more friendships have ended than I would have ever imagined.  After thinking about it a lot, I finally wrote to two friends:

trump's election has severely jolted my view of America, and of the 63 million who voted for him. I am sad that our relationship has suffered as a result.
trump's politics of hate, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and lies are very different from everything that I cherish and dream about.  And, as a brown-skinned and  funny-accented immigrant who looks like an Arab from a shithole, these past two years I have even been worried about my personal safety.

I have always had friendly interactions across the political spectrum, except for the far-right and the far-left.  Two of the three grad school professors I worked with were practically libertarians.  Most of my grad school friends were well left of the political center.  I was always happy in a mixed crowd, and worried if I everybody around me thought and believed alike.

In the life after grad school, there were plenty of people I interacted with who were committed Republicans.  One group asked me to join their board after reading my op-eds, and I did.  Many of our board meetings were at the country club where the board president was a member, and I knew I was out of place there with my proletarian car and my left-of-center politics.  But, we worked together without any hassle.

trump has changed everything.  For worse.

It has been ten days since that email; no reply, which does not surprise me.  After all, how might one possibly argue with evidence that trump's politics is not about hate, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, lies, and more?

James Baldwin summarized it well for blokes like me who lack the kind of clarity and power of articulation that he had; he wrote:

Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

trump and his 63 million voters have been systematically working against freedom, justice, and democracy.  There is no respect for the "others."  Thus, for a guy who thinks that the cliched "forget and forgive" is all bullshit, terminating friendships naturally follows--with a great deal of sadness!

PS: See you in 2019, after a break from blogging.