I've often lived in an America meaner than the sum of its parts. I was born into the hopeful Kennedy years, and I was five when the Civil Rights Act made things a little better. The American with Disabilities Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency were a couple bright spots, too.Meanwhile, a majority of citizens supported wars in Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, and lots of little places and little wars in between. Jimmy Carter, with his sensible sweater and solar panels, made me think things weren't so bad. But I remember the Reagan/Bush years, when nastiness was the point and people were encouraged to say what they already felt, the Clinton years, when citizens were left banging on empty factory doors, and the Bush II years, when lies authorized a lot of death.
Obama, well, what can I say. We really saw a difference, both in personal conduct on the president's part and government. That "hopey-changey thing" Sarah Palin disparaged made things easier for a lot of people. Sure, there were still food wastelands in all our inner cities and prices fluctuated, the way they always do. But for the first time, in my lifetime, we had a president who understood that most of us live paycheck to paycheck, a lot of us don't have steady transportation, and those that do can't always afford to use it. Obama understood that bosses could be assholes and owners looked out for themselves long before they paid a living wage or overtime. We felt the meanness many Americans experienced at the hands of officials begin to slip.
Then came trump I. The hood came out. Children were separated from parents. Many children died. The guy who was supposed to be looking out for us suggested we pour bleach in our guts to relieve the symptoms he got the most cutting-edge treatment for. In the name of enriching himself further, he bullied, stole, and cheated.
We hired Biden, Obama's number 2, and thought we'd bid adieu to America's Bunga-bunga leader. And for a while, especially when Joe made the decision to put country before himself and stepped aside for Kamala, it looked like we had it made. It would be a rout.
It was a rout. But in the wrong direction.
Kamala was not a flawed candidate, or not any more so than any candidate, and if you want to call a candidate flawed, look to the one with 34 felony convictions, the one whose followers were violent because he told them to be, the one who had to have a new vice presidential candidate because they tried to hang the last one. In any contest, there shouldn't have been one. But there was.
We lost.
America is mean again in the agglomerate. Get any two together and they'll find a way to diminish a third.
That's who we are, and I want to thank the electorate for defenestrating the notion I wasn't aware I still held that we were a unique nation, one where right wins out, where history is slow in coming but is coming still, where decade by decade the lives of its people get better. This second trump term, even if it ends with him, leaves the clock America lives by spun back, particularly if he names another SCOTUS member.
This time it's not just Muslims and Hispanics (whose individual votes for him actually increased) on the receiving end of their meanness. It's women (oddly, a group which voted in greater numbers for him than in 2020, despite all they have lost, except for black women, who have never had illusions about America's meanness) and the LGBTQ+ community and people who are already at a disadvantage and whose lives were already endangered. I'm white and straight and already on a lower rung of the middle class, and I can feel the meanness boiling around me. I can't imagine the fear my friends face.
Amid all this despair, can I offer any hope? Yes.
While America in the aggregate is mean, individual Americans are not. When I lived in my car, I was often taken in by people I never would have expected. From sharing beers in the truck bed with a bunch of guys who had more guns than teeth, to fundamentalist Christians who gave me a safe place to sleep and eat without attaching their religion to it except as the reason they did it, to any number of people in suits and skirts giving me money because I asked for it, when you get people one on one they surprise and delight you.
While a majority of us allowed our inner trump to direct our actions and together can terrorize what Jesus called "the least of these," I celebrate the rolled-down car window and a hand holding out a $20 to the guy standing by the exit; the cop who might disdain their behavior helping up the trans~ victim of assault and listening to their story; the angry worker bee who has had it up to here with these illegals handing a bottle of water to the thirsty Guatemalan at 6 AM in front of Home Depot; the self-described trad wife whose greatest fear is she won't have dinner ready on time offering the single mom who's paying with EBT and is short $2 to add it to her bill, and then takes out another $10 in cash for her.
Are these examples of self-aggrandizing individuals making themselves feel a little better about how they have it by deigning to give a little out in dribs and drabs? Maybe. Maybe it's all we've got. Maybe we're all we've got. Like the beloved Ram Dass said, "We're all just walking each other home." Even Jesus laid it out on the individual: "Sell all you possess and give it to the poor and then follow me." Maybe the best we can hope for in a mean America is the individuals who give away what they have one element at a time, making one person's day a little bit better.
It's like the kid who throws a starfish back into the ocean. Help that one.
