Weapon of Choice / Cowardly, Lyin'

-Weapon of Choice-

The more time that goes by, the more clear it is that people feel the need to *do* *something*. Whether it's protesting in the streets below Trump Tower, or wearing a safety pin, or repeatedly calling their Congressmen to get them to oppose whatever new ridiculousness is being foisted on us, everyone has an opinion on what we should *do* *now*.

Believe me, I'm in the same boat. There are so many forms of protest that it's hard to know where to start. Especially when, as soon as one form starts to gain some solidarity behind it, a backlash comes through that says that it's a nice gesture but it's not enough, or here's proof that such-and-such a method is really ineffective, so why bother?

As I've sifted through the different possible methods to voice my distaste at the sense of legitimacy and empowerment that racist and xenophobic groups have suddenly decided they have, and the general ludicrousness of a President that has only a tenuous grasp of what power a President actually has, I've had to take a look at the way I am currently living my life.

The truth of it is that there are responsibilities I have in my life that I just can't shirk while railing against tyranny and hatred. My resources are limited: I don't have much money to donate, or much time to volunteer. So, I have to ask myself, what is it that I *do* have? What can I contribute in a way that is even the slightest way unique? The answer, when I framed it to myself in such a way, came quickly. I've got *words*, dammit. *Words*.

Now, go ahead. Say that it isn't enough, that quiet, rational contemplation never got a country anywhere. Action, not words, etc.... But if the last week has proven anything to me, it's that there's always going to be someone telling you that what you're doing isn't enough, or that you're doing it the wrong way. If that's going to be the case, why not do it in the way that feels most right to you, and that plays to your strengths?

I actually started writing essay pieces several years ago, while I was unemployed. They ranged from science to pop culture, autobiographical to philosophical to political. Compared to my fiction, they were some of the most widely viewed and disseminated things I've done. They're still viewable right on this very blog, because I've never felt the need to publish them (plus, to be honest, I now look at them as a little too navelly-gazey for me to not be a little embarrassed by most of them).

My point is that I've been unconsciously preparing myself for this for a while now. And this is all stuff that I've got to get out one way or another, because if I don't it's going to coil itself into a small, searing ball directly under my sternum that's going to distract me from actually living my life.

So I'm going to do what, ideally, we all should do... find an avenue that is the thing that you individually can do best, and use it to battle the injustices you find. Because they're going to be coming fast and furious over the next few years, friends.

I have a caveat to this declaration, though, and it's that I'm not going to stop my fiction. I've come too far in my current novel to set it aside, and an argument can be made that art is going to be very important in the coming years. So here's the deal. Some Fridays you'll get some new chapters about the progressively weirder goings-on at the Whitetail lodge on this blog, and some weeks you're going to get an earful of my take on what's happening in this post-truth, post-Obama world. Sometimes you'll get both. Read all of it, some of it, or none of it. I'm going to write it anyway. It's not all I'm going to do, either. Reading and thinking is never *all* you should do. But this place, right here, is where I'm going to make my primary stand, with the weapon that feels strongest in my grip.

-Cowardly, Lyin'-

The most disturbing trend I'm seeing today -- one among many -- is the validation of white supremacist groups. I'm not saying that they're abnormally on the increase -- they've always been around, and always grow if they're given visibility -- but they have a platform now: a President who at best will not denounce them, and at worst will sees no problems in loading his Cabinet and staff with their members.

The leading edge of this group's ideology is that there is something inherently superior about being from Western European ancestry. They claim that it is their genetic destiny to monopolize the world's somehow-finite stockpile of adventurers and thinkers and inventors, and that subjugation of others is an inevitable by-product. This is, of course, bullshit. In reality, this mentality is an excuse and avoidance of the fact that White people aren't better than other races, they're just historically better at being exploitive, aggressive assholes, the bully in the playground that makes it impossible for anyone to relax or thrive.

So here's what I have to say to white supremacist groups: The world is more diverse and complex than just your little corner of it. I know, it's comforting to surround yourself with those who look and think just like you. It's certainly the easy way out, and it was an simpler goal in the past. However, the world is connected now and that's a one-way street. Those of us in urban areas have a better understanding of this. We know that cultures can be peacefully integrated and mutually benefit from it. It happens all the time.

You know those trouble spots that you're thinking of, the gang-riddled, lawless zones which you're convinced every city is? It's because white people have engineered them as places where inequality is the norm, where people have been hemmed in and oppressed by lack of education, lack of opportunity, and lack of support.

I can see where your isolated little worldview makes you think the opposite. In your narrow sight, America is dying. Crime is rampant, morality is out the window, most people are leeches sucking off the system set up by the divine right of the Caucasian race. But here's the reality that you need to lift up your head and see: The world is a more peaceful place than it has been in the recorded history of humanity. Inequity and poverty has always been a problem, it's just that until now it hasn't been *your* problem . Funny how you suddenly feel the need to solve your race's conflicts with others, now that you're not twenty points in the lead anymore.

And let's get that straight. As hard as you try to play it this way, you're not the victim. White people are still in the lead. Through no effort on your part, you lucky Straight White Male you, your particular genetics have allowed you to start out with a significant statistical lead. The idea that there's any other ethnic or sexual group even growing *close* to you in influence is frightening, because suddenly you might have to admit that you're not the center of the Universe after all. And in my opinion, that's one of mankind's biggest problems in general. It always has been.

Once you cross that psychological hurdle, you just might realize that your statements about how races can never really get along is just your own hatred, projected on everyone else.

Some of you are making it easy for the rest of us, by trying to backtrack the world into its violent past in your comfortable old symbols and costumes. But be aware that you are being watched. Even if you're not wrapped in a Confederate flag or you've taken off your white hoods, we recognize who you are. You will not win. Time and numbers are against you. Take your victory lap while it lasts, and then make way.

But bear this in mind: your new visibility makes it harder for you to hide. There have been a lot of disgusting verbal and physical attacks, and defacings since the election, but the most common thread running through them is that afterward, you seem to feel some kind of relief, even going as far to say, "Finally, we can say these things out loud again!" So let me understand this... you apparently have been in torment, holding back your venom lo these eight more-tolerant years, but why? Was it because you thought you were in the minority? Well, you still are. Because of who the President was? Well, then that just makes you a coward. Just watch the rest of us *not* hold our opinions back during this next administration, regardless of who the official leader of our country is. And let that demonstrate to you how weak you truly are. The only thing you have to contribute is temporary obstacles, driven by your own fear. Well, there's one comforting thing about being paranoid: No one will ever be able to prove you wrong.

Whitelodge 12.1 & 12.2

-12.1-

Now that Sheryl had switched places with Kelly, she could appreciate how hard it was to be the buffer between the snowmobile and the sledge. She had to recline between Kerren and Glenda (trying hard to drive from her mind the thought that one of the women was deceased), and brace her feet against the back of the snowmobile, right below where Manoj sat.

When she had been up on that seat herself, there hadn't felt like there were much change in the hybrid vehicle's downward velocity. Now, with nothing but her body making sure that the two pieces didn't collide with the slightest fluctuation in speed, it was getting harder. It was taking most of her strength and concentration to keep everything steady.

She decided to take a chance and throw a look back over her shoulder toward Kerren. The sight of her wife's face was pretty much the only thing that was keeping Sheryl going; it was the reason she had asked Kelly to trade places with her, so the two of them could be closer. When she looked back (which was as much a matter of tipping her head back as turning it to the side), the expression of incredulity on that lovely face was enough to get her to look down the mountain.

It was surprising how quickly she determined what she was looking at, what they were heading for. She had experienced that strange period of whiteness just as it seemed everyone else had, and it had so disoriented her that she wasn't particularly surprised to see the Deertail Lodge on the slope below them. It felt natural to her somehow, although she wasn't even close to being clear whether it had been relocated, or they had.

Regardless, it was there, and growing larger in Sheryl's view. It was kind of hard to see, because she was almost lying down on the sledge, and so close to the rear of the snowmobile that the vehicle obscured most of her field of vision. Before this catastrophe had occurred, she he had to admit that she had been nervous enough about hitting the ski slope the next morning that she had already imagined/dreaded seeing the building from the upslope side. It might be because of this that she recognized it so easily.

Sheryl braced her legs, sure that Dale was going to slow down so that they could at least reevaluate their journey. Were they going to go around its half-buried bulk and try again, or stop and go back inside? Was it just a fluke that they had looped back around above the Lodge, or would it happen every time they tried to get down to the town? She tried to shut her mind away from that thought; it brought up too many other thoughts, not the least of which was that it would mean that their imprisonment -- and maybe the avalanche itself -- had some kind of design to it. Once you opened that door, the question of a designer came up, and then things got *really* terrifying.

She realized that the change in pressure against her feet, which would happen every time the snowmobile slowed and the sledge started to catch up with it, wasn't happening yet. If anything, she felt as if the snowmobile were pulling away from her... which would mean that Dale was speeding up. Why would that be happening? She could chalk it up to his impatience, except for the fact that they were still heading toward the building. Not toward the center, between the two wings, but if they kept on this heading, they weren't going to avoid it.

Panic started to creep in around the edges of Sheryl's mind. What was Dale doing? She started to tap the heel of her boot against the back panel of the snowmobile to get the attention of someone of the vehicle, but got no reaction. She kicked a little harder, and then even harder. Soon she was drumming both feet against the smooth surface with as much force as she could, the continuing acceleration of the snowmobile making it difficult to make a truly loud noise, as the sledge kept trying to pull back from it.

She even tried to lift her foot enough to nudge Manoj's butt with it, but couldn't get her leg up that far without first gaining solid purchase on the sledge, which she just didn't have. There was nowhere to sit but the edges of the storage bags that had been laid over Glenda to keep the blowing snow away from her, and they slid around dangerously every time Sheryl tried to move her legs too much.

The building continued to draw closer, and their vantage point became higher as they rode the gradual rise of the snow that piled there during avalanche. Sheryl began to panic; she was becoming more and more convinced that Dale was not going to stop. They were going to ride up onto the roof and... then what?

From here, she couldn't see much of the roof, nor could she tell how flat it was. Could it be that he was waiting to slow to a stop until they were on some clear patch of roof? It would be easier than skidding to a stop on snow, but then shouldn't he at least be not accelerating?

Sheryl threw her head back to look at Kerren again, completely at a loss for what to do. She realized how much she was like Kerren, nearly immobile and unable to affect what was going on around her. Panic began to rise to the back of her throat when she saw the expression on her wife's face; clearly, she was thinking the same thing Sheryl was. This was all wrong.

Sheryl tried to call back to her "It's okay!" and then went back to kicking the back of the snowmobile, digging in with her boot heels. She watched the panel buckle under the force, twisting the moonlight and shaping it into crazy arcs. She threw out her arms and tried to grab the edges of the sled, giving herself as much purchase as she could. She could only reach one of them, on Kerren's side, although it might have been that she felt weird about reaching across Glenda's body to grip the farther side.

She started yelling, trying to get someone's attention. As far as she could tell, no one on the snowmobile had changed position... did they know what was going on? Whatever Dale's plan could be, was it possible that they were going along with it? That was the only thing her mind had to cling to now; that there was something in front of them that she couldn't see, something that made sense for them to speed onto the Lodge's roof.

She kept kicking, kept yelling, although when she felt the transition of the snowmobile's skis and treads go from churning through snow to grinding across roof shingles, she closed her eyes.

-12.2-

Bruce looked at the spot Theda had disappeared from, acutely aware that this time he was not asleep. It wasn't all that different experience, he found; things that before had been kind of hazy and wavery were just in sharper focus. Colors were sharper, and there was a vital sense of place that had been lacking before. Of course, when he had visited this place in dreams he had been waiting for her, eager to hear the ideas she would always impart to him. But now that she had left, he had nothing to do but analyze his surroundings more closely, and strive to figure out how to get back.

He found himself turning around and around inside the circle of Sounding Stones, trying to determine which direction was most likely to provide escape. The first gap he tried was the one Theda had been standing at, opposite her usual direction of approach from the nearby forest. But when he stepped into the space between the stone columns, he felt the same invisible backward pressure he always had, the one that kept him from moving between the stones.

He turned around one more time, facing back toward the forest. Was there some coded message in her coming to him from the other direction? He walked across the circle, approaching her usual spot, and stopped. Yes, the world was different here somehow. He just had to figure out what it was. He stood there for a few moments, looking back and forth between the opposing directions, and literally felt the answer lock into place inside his head.

Before, on those nights he had come and there had been no Theda, he had noted that his dreamworld had been shrinking. And it still was; in the nights that had passed since he had last been here, the horizon had gotten appreciably closer... but only in the direction he had just seen her in. When he looked instead at the forest, he could see that it was just as it had always been. If anything, it had grown more lush with foliage. Perhaps that was why Theda had forced him to turn around the other way -- she wanted him to notice this.

He drew close to the two Sounding Stones that he was accustomed to seeing Theda between. Before he got too close, he noticed the change. There was an openness that hadn't been here before, a lack of pressure that allowed him to feel, probably for the first time, what the air was like outside the deceptively open-appearing circle. He passed between the stones with no resistance.

He took a deep breath, only now realizing how rich and oxygenated the air was, compared to inside the circle. It was like being relieved of an asthma attack he didn't even know he was having. The air outside was so deliciously dense, and he realized that if had been wearing flowing robes, they very well might be doing that underwater-floating thing that he always noticed Theda's doing. He turned his bare feet -- luxuriating in the feel of the velvety soil on his soles -- onto the path she had always come down on those imaginatively fertile nights.

The forest ahead was singing. He could hear it calling to him, and as he drew closer he could see more of those faint, lazily whirling lights in its interior. They beckoned him forward, drifting along branches, jumping the span between closely-packed trunks, as if the tiny lights were searching for something, or carrying important messages. Bruce couldn't deny that they seemed to have a sense of purpose. And through it all, a low hum permeated the thickened air, voices in thousands of languages that seemed to have no real source. The only thing they had in common was their shared sense of eagerness. They had something to say, these voices, and took great delight in speaking it, even if those voices were heard by no one in particular.

He passed into the vague shadow of the trees, his feet crossing the boundary between the forest and the rest of the dreamworld. The air inside was cooler, but thrummed with energy. The voices grew in volume, replacing the sound of brushing leaves and creaking branches that he would have expected if he had been in an earthly place. His breath caught as he heard a fragment of phrase in English. At least he thought it was English; the accent was unlike any he'd ever heard, although at times it came close to complete recognition.

It was hard to parse out every word over the general low-level cacophony, but every now and then there were words he recognized, mostly because they were unique and linked by a common thread. He first heard "hurly-burly", then "Dunsinane" and "Birnam wood". Bruce stood, swiveling his head from one side to the other, trying to triangulate where these particular words were coming from. With each recognition, he took a few steps toward where they seemed to originate. Eventually, he could hear entire lines from the tale he was so familiar with: "Show his eyes, and grieve his heart; Come like shadows, so depart!"

Somewhere, Shakespeare's Macbeth was being recited, the first scene where the future king encounters three witches that prophesy his future. The play had always been one of Bruce's favorites, in his mind the perfect literary encapsulation of man's unending drive for power, and how it inevitably causes his downfall. The words themselves seemed to be emanating from the yards-thick tree in front of him. How was this possible? And were all the other voices surrounding him also coming from the millions of trees? This particular one did seem to be sturdier that the others, Its bark dark and thickly grooved. It had seen many years of healthy growth, and even its lower branches overhead were heartier than the trunks of many of those around it. As an organism, it was unutterably beautiful.

For the briefest of instants, Bruce caught a flash of the memory he had experienced earlier, when he had seen one of his invented characters apparently conjured out of thin air near an unusually effective movie premiere. He had that same electric feeling now, that he was seeing a story spontaneously made into something alive. Then, it had been a person; now, it was a tree. But the similarity was undeniable...

A realization hit him with almost physical force. He was standing in a forest that was also what he, for lack of a better name, had been calling the AllStory. Since the night of that premiere, he had tried to find out more about this unusual concept. The awareness of it had been around long before Bruce came to learn of it, but had been hidden well, its secret details discussed and discreetly passed along only by a select few. Over the years he had found tangential bits of it, and felt he knew a little of its nature, if not its true name.

The secret, he learned, was this: stories, in their own way, are alive. And not in the sense that they live in our hearts and minds. No, that night in the alley had been his first glimpse into the possibility that when stories are loved, when they are felt in human hearts and turned around and around in human minds, as they are told and retold over years, that process of imagination weaves some kind of alchemy that begins to shape and bend reality.

At first, his mind rebelled against the concept. But the more he pulled at the thread, finding tiny mentions of it in secret literary circles by authors who had similar inklings of the nature of thing, it began to make more sense. He began to think of all the characters he had read about, and how the best ones had become ingrained in him, a part of his soul. These experiences formed some of the deepest human connections he had ever known. And now he was aware that there were many others who had read those same books and conjured those same people out of their own thoughts... the same words forming a common neural path in the vast network of human minds, ones that were continually reinforced, by the exact same words, the exact same conveyance of thought. Couldn't the argument be made that a character like Lady Macbeth, or Huckleberry Finn, or Gilgamesh, was more fully realized, more shared, more *real*, than just about anyone else in the history of the world?

The hardest part to accept in all this -- that the world of humanity was the jumping-off points for countless other worlds, ones that had started out imaginary but had evolved into their own little universes, where heroes and villains lived and breathed, where anything from fantastic epics to tiny scraps of fancy had a chance of being made flesh, tangentially weaving themselves into the tapestry of reality?

Bruce was now faced with the idea that what he had been chasing all these years was real. All of it. The author wondered what all these other trees clustered around Macbeth were. Where had they come from, what language emanated from their cores, how were they affected by the stories whose branches and roots entwined with theirs? And, his sharper-than-average ego spoke from the back of his head, where were *his* trees? What worlds had he dreamed, that now grew in this impossibly fertile place?

He was starting to run through the forest, his bare feet pounding through the lush underbrush. His mind had suddenly become ravenous to see more of this forest, to try in some meager way to grasp its breadth and its inner connections. He sprinted through lush, green chapels formed by arching trunks, whispering voices urging him on, deeper into the heart of the story-forest, faster and faster, until it seemed to be rushing toward him more quickly than he was moving toward it, denser and darker and denser and darker...

11/9: Today, I Disbelieve

Okay, I'm out of panic mode. So let me put some words down and see what I really feel about this abrupt right turn the country has made. Actually, the more I contemplate it, my biggest shock is that it isn't really all that abrupt. On 11/9, having my hopes dashed over the course of the previous evening in a way that I can't ever remember experiencing, I rose to face a morning where it seemed that everything I thought the country stood for had been flipped on its head.

As I thought about it, and the more I read the shock, awe, and disgust that my friends were rightly venting on Facebook, my mind eventually turned toward trying to figure out *how* this happened. My assumption was that there was something I must have missed. And I think it was the same thing that all the polls and talking heads that I paid attention to all year had been missing. There really was a "silent majority", and they made their voice collectively heard that Tuesday night.

Who are they? I began to wonder. To figure it out, I first threw away all the studies that I had read about how Trump supporters are high-income whites, or non-college educated white males, or whatever. Because the sources telling me that were the exact same ones that also had Hillary winning from anything to a 3-point lead to a landslide.

Let's start with this question: are over half the American population racist, xenophobic, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ maniacs that will swallow any populist lie they're told? The answer, of course, has to be no. There's no way this country could exist in the form it does if that were true. Even further than that, I don't even think it's possible that they're all so ambivalent that they're okay with supporting a candidate who is. Because there are tons of non-election-related surveys over the span of the past ten years that say that the country is gradually but steadily leaning *away* from those things.

So why did they do it? The answer, even though I was too stunned to see it at the time, lay in the election analysis maps that they kept referring to during the televised coverage. It was repeated in state after state... blue cities, with red in between. I remember seeing the same thing in previous elections, although it had been less pronounced. This time, however, I started stitching it together with a couple other things I had been thinking about...

My parents both grew up in a small town in Ohio. It was a thriving community back then, a company town that had been built up around a local manufacturing plant for a major industrial supplier. Two of my four grandparents worked for it, and a third was in an ancillary development company. But the plant closed in the late 80s. The town is still there, and several of my relatives still live in the area, but what does a town do when its major economic driving force is gone, and it's basically in the middle of nowhere, thirty miles from a major interstate? Honestly, there's not a lot it can.

That's why the people who live there now can't see themselves included in the years of Obama progress. It simply didn't affect them, and the situation gets worse as income, industry, and young people slowly bleed away to the big cities. When you live in a situation like that year after year, without a clear solution in sight, I imagine that you'll be willing to put up with an offensive blowhard *if* he tells you that he can fix it, if he tells you that your situation is not your fault (and on that point, if not much else, he's right). He says that it's the fault of the immigrants that are simultaneously a drain on the economy and also "taking" good jobs, religions you have never come into close contact with, evil corporations that are moving overseas, welfare moochers, etc. It must sound particularly good if the alternative is four more years of the same.

In no way here am I sticking up for Trump, or endorsing him. Honestly, it's like someone asked me to fill out a questionnaire about what I find most odious about humanity, and then turned it into human form. But what I'm trying to figure out is *why* a generally rational person -- which, like I said, we have to assume most of his supporters are -- would act like they've lost their damn mind and actually vote for him.

It struck me, when network news started describing who was voting for Trump on that fateful night, that I was kind of hearing myself being described. "These are people who are struggling," they said. "They live paycheck to paycheck, and any increases in their salary are not enough to match the increase in the cost of living. Gains in the economy aren't applying to them, and the feel that they're being left behind." Wow. That's me. My wife and I work one-and-a-two-thirds full time jobs, raise our child, live in surprisingly affordable housing considering on its location, and yet we worry about paying the bills. We don't live beyond our means, and in general we have what we need to get by without a ton of hardship, but we're well below the country's median income. I went ahead and tallied it up, and was surprise to find that my personal yearly income over the past six years has increased by a shade over 6%. Now, this figure spans three different companies, two of which I was laid off from due to their financial difficulty, so I have to say the recession paid a large part in this. But still, there was a time when a 3% yearly increase was considered the standard, enough to cover the general cost-of-living increases and the usual rise in health care costs. This isn't to complain, I'm just saying that I think that, while we're living on the fringe of an affluent, major metropolitan area, we're still just one layoff, accident, or mechanical breakdown from seriously losing our hold on things.

I know we're not alone. Many of our friends, I'm sure, are in the same boat as we are. It's kind of the reality of American living these days. While the economy was recovering, we accepted this, but should we anymore? Why aren't we one of the 49-whatever-% that voted to be led by a disgusting, misogynist bully? I'm starting to form an answer for that.

The Obama years have brought many things back to the country since it was handed to him on the brink of collapse, and I will always commend him and his team for stopping that from happening. We took serious damage, but in general it was a huge nation-killing bullet that he helped us dodge. But you know what I admired most about him as a President? It was the social change that he fostered. By the time he leaves his office, he will have significantly advanced women's rights, provided a safer national environment to fight racism, rape culture and homophobia, and in general made America more inclusive for everyone. For me, economic growth has taken a backseat in the last few years as I've seen gay marriage legalized across the board, grassroots anti-racism movements gain momentum, and women's roles in government and business escalate. These are the main advances I don't want to see go away under a Trump presidency. One thing I am sure of here is that I will do whatever I can to prevent rights being rolled back for anyone who's gained ground in these comeback years.

So that's my main personal agenda: continued social progress. I am positive that we can't help but prosper economically when over half the population (women and traditional minorities) aren't hamstrung and limited in how much they can contribute to the country. All the boats will rise, I say. But I say this with full awareness that, despite everything, I have the financial luxury to make it my priority.

So why was this such a rope-a-dope to most, if not all, of us Hillary supporters? I have to take a look at where I chose to go for my reassurance. Yes, I was one of those people who would open Nate Silver's 538Election website in the morning and periodically refresh it all day. It would dictate my moods, watching the red and blue squiggles thrillingly diverge and converge. And why shouldn't I have believed it? I chose that particular source because its founding principle was utter impartiality -- Mr. Silver's goal has always been to find the truth behind the numbers, utterly devoid of the urge to craft a story arc out of them. I found it refreshing, based on the skewed journalism I saw everywhere else, and in his goal he very well might have succeeded. He wasn't doing the polling himself, which was where the flaws entered the equation.

But I digress. What were my other sources? Well, they mostly came to Facebook in the guise of major metropolitan news sites and pitches from celebrities. I didn't piece it together until it was too late that all these sources originated in -- aha! -- big cities. It truly did seem like there was a tidal wave of Hillary support, but what I didn't consider was the online persona I had unwittingly crafted for myself. You see, as the tide of Trump support began to rise, I began to obsess when I saw one of my friends post something pro-Trump, gun-positive, or anti-Muslim. In my head, I would try to craft the perfect counter argument regardless of how much thought (or lack thereof) they put into their post or share. It would dominate my day and would never amount to anything I deemed worthy to respond with, so eventually I found it was just mentally less taxing to unfriend or block them.

But I see now what I was doing there. I was drawing up my bridges, creating a protective barrier of like-minded folks around me. And while it has been a source of great feelings of support and solidarity for me, it totally cut me off from what was happening in the rest of the country. (By the way, I don't see this practice changing. I won't voluntarily put up with hate speech in any form.) So while the Republican forces were marshaling, I was blissfully unaware, looking forward to another four years of prosperity without realizing that my family was only marginally profiting from it all. It was the same trap that our major news institutions and everyone else who had a real voice in the media fell into.

So what do we do now? Well, for one thing, we have to be even more vigilant than before to keep social progress from backsliding. What we Democrats all focused on was the support Trump had from racist and anti-immigrant groups, and this was well-founded. They're the scariest, most vocal and self-delusional minority in his base, and that's what we've trained ourselves to pay attention to. But they support him for a different reason than most do. Eradicating hate is not the only thing we need to do. But he sad truth is that we misled ourselves. We've ignored the bigger picture, which is that there is a vast segment of the country for whom the current system is just not working for, and hasn't been for a long time.

And so I come to a truth that keeps getting demonstrated to me... and I hate it because it goes against everything I was taught as a child. Even so, I'm forced to admit that it must be true: If you see something as a black-and-white conflict between good and evil, you're not looking closely enough. The problem is always more complex and harder to fix.

(Note: As I was working on this, I noticed that there were other people around the Internet that were seeming to come to the same conclusion. While this reassures me that my thinking may be on the right track, they often say it much more clearly and with better jokes than I ever could. Case in point, David Wong's recent article for Cracked that he wrote *a* *month* *ago*: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/.)