It isn’t easy to see an old friend lose his way and stumble off down a path you don’t wish to follow and Tuesday’s vote has given me pause. The world inhabited by Trump and his voters isn’t my world. The America I emigrated to was already in transition away from a reaction to the Great Depression and World War Two into a new era of do your own thing and be self reliant. I edged into it and have enjoyed the ride.
Now as I start the last part of my journey through life I find America has veered so far from the values of my youth, brought up in the shadow of 20th century violence and desolation, determined to do better, and accustomed to a world where decency and middle class solidarity were expected if not always reciprocated, I find myself on the sidelines of a social revolution I don’t understand.
A huge number of my fellow Americans have got together to elect a President whose values are so far from mine I don’t see my connection to the America I love anymore. To describe veterans as suckers and losers, to describe a riot in which police officers were killed and injured as a day of love, to show no respect to women, the handicapped, gays and racial minorities and to use religion as a cynical political tool, and take time to appease foreign dictators, none of these things represent my values.
But it is evident they do represent the values of the bulk of my neighbors. Trump is the expression of a national movement of fear that leaves me bewildered. The US I have inhabited has been a place of possibilities and triumphs, failures and happy chances, I have never seen the dystopian world described by Trump of horror and bloodbaths and immigrants like me killing pets and sodomizing children under pizza parlors. I am not a fan of politicians nor would I wish to be one. Some are terrible and some are decent and like most human endeavors they balance each other out and things get done albeit messily and slowly. Politics always used to be the Art of the Possible, the compromises that left everyone slightly pleased and somewhat frustrated but pulling together. Under Trump division and fear mongering are the political rules to live by.
Now we have a president elect promising firing squads and retribution. The privacy and separation of church and state is crumbling and the promise of a fresh opportunity to vote and change course in four years does not seem certain. These are not my values. Politics and religion and bank accounts are private things and in polite society these subjects don’t come up but here I am, feeling forced to take a stand for values that used to seem as natural as breathing in my youth and now are points of contention in a contentious world.
I find it hugely ironic to find myself in South America at this critical time, the land par excellence of bribery corruption and violent politics, a byword for political instability and dictatorship. After we left the US the Clay County registrar of elections said we didn’t qualify for a ballot as we don’t have a physical address. We were too far away to remedy this DeSantis inspired drive to purge the voting rolls and found ourselves stateless at this strange pivot point. Perhaps marking myself a Democrat didn’t help when the very red county officials decided to purge me but there we are, everything is now judged by your political stripe. I take comfort from the fact that in Florida the die was long since cast and every single expression of deviation from the Trump playbook was voted down and never came close. When I first became a citizen voting was encouraged, a non partisan civic duty, now it is a cause for law enforcement to say publicly you won’t get protection when you need it if you aren’t a member of The Party. Holy Soviet corruption Batman! And the officer responsible got suspended for a day. This America is too bizarre for me.
I don’t know what to think, far less what to do, an old man whose government pension is now under threat, who fears to speak publicly and freely, whose Jewish wife heard the stories of swastikas painted on the walls of the family business in Illinois in that awful distant decade we promised we would never forget.
As I travel through countries whose commitment to decency and democracy is under constant threat I find myself ashamed that I too now come from a country that is no better. If you don’t like it the Trumpists say, then leave it. Well perhaps they are right; we are in no hurry to return at this point.
I miss my America and I always will. It was great while it lasted.
As to the pension issue:
