The content of their character

"Couldn't you talk over a glass of wine or something?" asked the guest when I told her that the neighborhood's friendliness broke down after tRump became the GOP nominee three summers ago.

"Nope. For one, I don't drink. And tRump supporters are beyond any reasoning and logic," I replied.

I was not merely ranting.  Instead, I was working with evidence that some of them had even posted, or re-posted, virulent anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant messages and comments in Facebook, back when I still had an account in that black hole and when I was "friends" with them.  And the ultimate evidence that they, like 63 million voters, willingly elected a horrible human being.

As Jamelle Bouie clearly and succinctly phrased it, there is no such thing as a good tRump voter.

I broke with the neighbors not because we look different, or speak with different accents, but over "the content of their character" that Martin Luther King talked about:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. 

We praise Abe Lincoln not because of his physical appearance.  His character matters to us. We tell--or at least used to tell--kids about Honest Abe.

tRump has proved to be some kind of a Rorschach test on one's character.  And, as Charles Blow recently put it, he is rapidly undoing everything that we teach children about good character:

He is everything we teach our children not to be. In Trump’s world of immorality, the lessons being taught undo all the principles parents struggle to instill.
He is teaching our children that there is no absolute truth, there is “alternative fact.” It’s not what you say, but how you say it and how vociferously you can defend it.
He is teaching little boys that women’s bodies exist as playgrounds for privileged men, and that there is no price to be paid if you are popular enough or rich enough.
He is teaching little girls that if they are ever victims of sexual assault by a popular, wealthy boy and deign to reveal it, they will likely to come under withering verbal assault.
He is teaching our children that the color of one’s skin does indeed supersede the content of one’s character. He is teaching them that there is a skin-color hierarchy in which whiteness is perched on top.
He is teaching the black and brown children that their citizenship and connection to this country is tenuous and fractional, not like white children.
He is teaching them that it is a perfectly normal to separate some children from their parents, put them in cages, and argue that they don’t need soap, or toothbrushes or have the lights turned off so that they can go to sleep.
He is teaching them to never acknowledge an error, that apologies are for suckers, that what’s right is whatever you say it is.

And then think about this: There are kids growing up in the homes of ardent tRump supporters.

The children growing up in enormous portions of American households accept, defend and even applaud Trump’s behavior. What lessons are those children absorbing? What behaviors will be modeled on Trump’s example?

 No glass of wine will ever be able to fix these!