This sad piece of clickbait is making its shameful rounds. It's supposed to be a new call for unity, but it reads like a confession from a drug addict.
I went to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and I arrived home feeling heartbroken. It was the last way I expected to feel...
I wanted to be with people who shared my anger. Because I have been so angry about Donald Trump this past year. I have been angry at my country for electing this man, angry at my neighbors who support him, angry at the wealthy who sacrificed our country and its goodness for tax breaks, angry at the coal miners who believed his promises.
My fury has been bottomless. I drink my morning coffee from a cup that says, "I hate to wake up when Donald Trump is President." The constancy of my outrage has been exhausting, yet I have not yet found a way to quell it — nearly each day has brought a new reason to stoke the fire. But a day with my daughter, communing with the angry and the aggrieved, seemed a good way to try.
It's called rage addiction. It's not uncommon.
Trump isn't its cause, though the author blames him for her anger. This is personal anger projected outward as political agenda. It's commonplace in leftist protest movements. The people screaming at the sky aren't really angry at Trump. Their anger and frustration has an internal cause that they refuse to confront.
Then her car breaks down. A man and his son come over to fix it.
"Just ask any redneck like me what you can do with zip ties — well, zip ties and duct tape. You can solve almost any car problem. You’ll get home safe," he said, turning to his teenage son standing nearby. "You can say that again," his son agreed...
Our encounter changed the day for me. While I tried to dive back into my liberal podcast, my mind kept being pulled back to the gas station. I couldn’t stop thinking about the man who called himself a "redneck" who came to our rescue. I sized him up as a Trump voter, just as he likely drew inferences from my Prius and RESIST sticker. But for a moment, we were just two people and the exchange was kindness (his) and gratitude (mine).
The author is using stereotypes to make her own assumption. There's no way to know who her rescuer voted for. But that's not really the point.
The immediate conclusion is a decent one. We can all treat each other well. But the author still insists on blaming Trump for her reflexive hostility.
As I drove home, I felt the full extent to which Trump has actually diminished my own desire to be kind. He is keeping me so outraged that I hold ill will toward others on a daily basis. Trump is not just ruining our nation, he is ruining me.
But Trump isn't diminishing her kindness or ruining her. He can't do that to her. She's doing it to herself. And refusing to take responsibility for it.
Trump isn't causing her to have ill will. She's choosing to live that way because it feeds some sort of need. And rather than admit it, she blames Trump for her own anger.
How do we hold onto the fire fueling our resistance to the cruelty Trump unleashes, but also embrace the world with love? I wish I knew.
The answer is obvious. But the author doesn't want it.
Like most lefties, she wants to see herself as a good person while hating everyone outside her political circle. The encounter interfered with this egotistical attitude. It made her feel like she might be the bad person for being angry and hateful.
So her response is to try to stop hating random people she suspects might be Trump voters. That's progress, but it's not an answer. The answer is to examine the real causes of her anger and address them.
Because it isn't about Trump. It's about her.