One Small Voice: Can we get past Trump-fueled rift?

by Lynn Mandaville

I no longer have the stomach for railing against our president.

I am, after all, just one old woman with a big mouth.

However…

Nothing, it seems, will dissuade our president from his narcissistic approach to governing or campaigning these past few months.

Nothing, not even contracting this unpredictable coronavirus, will move him off his ambiguous message that COVID-19 is a deliberate creation by China, and is the reason that our “beautiful strong economy” is floundering, while at the same time the virus is nothing to be concerned about because “it’s no worse than the flu,” and the economy is coming back strong, “stronger than it’s ever been before in the history of our country.”

No amount of fact or reason can make him move off of the subjects of Hillary’s emails or Hunter Biden’s position on the board of Burisma and into the arena of actual policy and platform leading up to the election.

Trump is a walking, talking bundle of contradictions that only serves to highlight his shortcomings as leader of the free world.

It has been weeks since I’ve been able to put together any concrete or cohesive thoughts about where we are in time.

Things seem to happen so quickly that there isn’t time to grow accustomed to new standards.  There isn’t time to absorb new information about SARS-CoV-2.  There are no people outside our own tight circles of friends and family with whom to percolate ideas or vent frustrations.

In Arizona we did have a brief respite from the pandemic.  New cases and deaths had plateaued, even slightly declined, to the point that schools were actually hoping to open in one form or another.

But Labor Day happened, and overconfident, virus-weary people were congregating, infecting one another.  And now cases are escalating nationwide, schools that had opened are closed again, and the battle over face coverings is raging anew.

And if all that weren’t enough, now we have a president who, by the miracle of experimental therapeutics, has contracted and survived COVID-19 and now operates under the delusion that he is invincible, and if he can overcome it anyone can.

Yet the truth, according to my daughter-in-law, the front-line nurse, is that children are, indeed, coming down with COVID, and the cases she worries about are the teenagers who are arriving at the ER in too many numbers with Multiple Symptom Respiratory Syndrome from this virus, the syndrome that causes long-lasting infirmities of the heart and lungs, and can cause as yet unknown neurological problems that can last their lifetimes.

And the president continues right up to the election to lie to the American public about his success in battling this pandemic.

“We’re rounding the corner” he repeats like a parrot.

But instead of talking about real issues, like a bad economy caused by the pandemic, or health care, which will be more crucial to the populace than ever before because of the pandemic, or racial inequality in policing and in wealth inequity, which he doesn’t seem to care a whit about regardless of the pandemic, he chooses to resort to his old playlist:  Hillary’s emails, Hunter Biden and Ukraine, the debunked claim that Obama spied on his 2016 campaign, and all the other oldies.

There is, of course, the lie that he has a plan for each of the ills we are plagued with.  But saying there is a plan and actually having one are two very different things.  And Trump has never had a detailed, concrete plan for anything since he began his lark of running for president in 2015.

There is no reasoning with his base.

He has them as brainwashed as members of any cult.

They will follow him off any of the cliffs we are marching toward as a nation.

Is it any wonder that cases of depression and anxiety are at an all-time high?

Is it any wonder that people are swearing off the news until at least Wednesday, after the election is over?  IF it’s over?

Yet, in spite of all this, my main concern right now is not whether we as a nation will survive Trump, be it the past four years or another four.

We will survive it.

History has shown that sheer determination and will has seen America through a civil war, two world wars and various other “skirmishes,” a Dust Bowl, a Great Depression, several recessions, and some presidential assassinations.

What concerns me most is how our relationships with family and formerly close friends and colleagues will fare when the election is settled.

So many harsh words have been spoken.  So many vicious names have been called and aspersions cast.  So little listening and so much yelling as been done as to turn folks away from each other for the rest of their lifetimes.

We will have to find a way to bury the animosity that has grown over these past months.  We will need to unlearn the stereotypes we have formed about each other, the negative attitudes we have created in our own minds.

How can I ever communicate with people I used to admire after I’ve seen the vile memes they’ve reposted online?

How can I believe their worn-on-the-sleeve Christianity after seeing the racist undertones in their messaging?

How will they ever view me the same after they’ve seen my own biases and rantings on Facebook?

It is going to take incredible force of will to overlook the attitudes we’ve formed under the tutelage of Donald Trump.  And that’s assuming Biden is the new president.

If Trump is re-elected, our feelings will only become more deep seated and destructive.

This is the existential conundrum that keeps me awake at night.

This is the reality that will consume me for the foreseeable future.