So Naive (Part 1)

I'm a white straight male born in the United States of America. I had what I think was a lower-middle-class upbringing in a medium-sized but growing city on the edge of the South. My Dad had a steady job with a good company, and after my younger brother and I started public school, my mom went to school, became a nurse, and got a decent job with a popular family doctor. I didn't worry about much. We didn't have a lot, but until I started high school and had a circle of friends beyond my neighborhood, it never struck me that anyone might have had a different time of it. Of course, I was naive.

If I had been listening, I would have realized that there were many things that could have made my family different from others, and other families different from ours. A lot of people didn't live in a new three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom brick house. In my sheltered naivete, I didn't know that some people didn't have a house, or an apartment, or a room, or anywhere. Some people didn't have a mom or a dad, or grandparents. Some of them didn't have jobs, or food to eat all the time, or clothes that hadn't belonged to several somebodies else at one time or another. Yep, I was naive.

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, I have been stressed about things I never worried about before. 45 was an unqualified narcissist "reality" show host who thought he was a great businessman and had a track record of failed businesses, unpaid debts, and chronic racism to show for it. He inherited a shit fortune from a shit family and parlayed it into a shit legacy that would put him in a position to convince a lot of frustrated Americans who felt like whatever problems they had in life were someone else's fault. Most of them are probably right, but 45's one great gift was convincing them that non-white, non-straight, non-male, educated non-Christians or immigrants were the ones to blame. He lied.

And they fell for it.

But when 45's voters (with, possibly, some help from outside the U.S.) put him in the White House, I was confident that our country's system of checks and balances, enshrined in the Constitution, would protect Democracy from him. Boy was I naive.

Continued in Part 2 next week. Mahalo.