America Great again!

[The Grand Nudger]

Were do you live?  It's easy to empathize, it really is....alot of trump voters have it super shitty.  I know a trump voter who raised two wonderful kids, and lifetime spent in commision only sales sending them both to college.  He lives a tiny camper on a trailer court, now.  I know another that raised not only his own children, but his grandchildren...and his neighbors and friends children - and he;s still at it..providing for his great grandchildren even though he was diagnosed with a series of debilitating illnesses nearly twenty years ago (VA coverage is all that's keeping him going).  Things that would -force- other people to retire...he's still doing hard ass work in his 80's.  So many kids there weren't enough beds and couches combined, at times....working one job, 40 hours a week.  Now he works 60, and they couldn't survive, let alone continue to provide even though they have many, many fewer mouths to feed....if so much as a bad cough came on - or if he had to pay for insurance, or if he was replaced by a younger man at work.  Both of these men have fallen on hard times, but injury itself wasn't enough to break them...I'd never have expected either to vote for trump...now, though, they feel insulted, ignored, devalued, marginalized. They think that other people who don;t work as hard, or who don;t hold to their idea of american ideals, are getting a better deal than they are. It's a shitty combination, and a shitty situation to be in. Then, good god, then....one party threw up a candidate that;s everything they -both- hate about government. One was told he must be a sexist bigot not to vote for her...the other that he must be a racist not to vote for her...... and you know what, they had both been told this about themselves time and time again long before this election.

The one is a sexist bigot, but in no way a -racist-.  The other is a racist, but in no way a sexist bigot.  I call them both dad. I'm a rural american, to my core, -though admittedly I went to good schools in a big city- which sort of makes me sound like a defacto liberal in the eyes of yall...and my rural compatriots...lol..whose heard all the same things and more from the same damned party, and the same damned voters...because I live in the woods, hurr durr. Yall don't need me anymore, I'm what's wrong with america, and my every political opinion makes me an enemy of women, children, and minorities. When I try to solve a problem outside of party lines....I'm suddenly part of the problem..and I mean this right down to what I do for a living, lol. There's a fund in this state for women that do what I do. For minorities that do what I do. For immigrants that do what I do. I'm not eligible (my wife and I joke about reforming our llc with her at the top just to game the system), and that money, largely, doesn't get handed out or keeps getting handed out to the usual suspects who..in many cases, don't need it and have never needed it.

It shouldn't be hard to empathize..even if you don't agree. It just might be that the only reason I didn't lose my godamned mind and vote Trump is because I haven't had to feel, truly feel, the loss in status or station that they have. I'm doing well, and can, to a much larger degree, escape the criticism levied at all three of us, often enough in ignorance.....though, I;m not blowing smoke up anyones ass on this election. Buncha racist, sexist bigots.....elected Trump..but also, I'd have to allow, people -like me- who aren't doing as well as I have been, often... because they just so happen to be in the demographic of the racists, and the sexists, and the bigots.