That Time I Watched Myself Become Part of a Minority While in the ICU

Maybe my body knew what was about to happen

Photo by Nicholas Bartos on Unsplash

I was in the ICU at Emory University Hospital the day before the election. I had just returned from a walk to the store to buy my son a birthday card feeling a little winded. That seemed unusual because I walk a lot. Then my right knee nearly buckled. I’d been having trouble with my vision for a couple of days. Earlier, I had set up an optometry appointment, suspecting my dad’s glaucoma had performed a successful DNA transfer. But when my knee tried to go out from under me, the words, “medical event” flashed before my eyes. Off to urgent care, then to Emory Hospital’s intensive care unit.

Long story short, when the results of the election began to trickle in, I was trying to negotiate with a set of tubes inserted in somewhat unmentionable areas whilst experiencing a battle with an episode of diarrhea for the ages.

The two coinciding events were perfect parallels.

Since then, I’ve had some time to ponder the election’s horrific results without the benefit of reading a lot of my favorite writers. So this is just mostly me and what is left of my sanity as I consider, like all of us are doing, the path forward.

We are not the resistance

The first thing I realized is that the election results don’t allow us to claim the noble mantle of resistance. It’s fair to say that Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary was part of Putin’s current war against the West, and, so, by extension, was this. We can argue that the addition of yet another vector in the right wing’s propaganda arsenal, Musk’s Twitter, helped create an unfair playing field.

But we’re all adults here. It isn’t unreasonable to expect a higher level of research from people making the fundamental decision of choosing a president. That research should somehow extend beyond what Joe Rogan or Elon Musk shout for. It wasn’t MAGA voters who won this election for Trump. It was the low-information voter.

The hardest truth of this election is that there were so many others who disagreed with me about Trump and who were content with their silence about their true feelings. The stories about arguments with our MAGA relatives are legion. The stories of those younger men who carried forth those same arguments were not. Worse, they weren’t interested in an argument. They quietly made their decision with little interest in the countless arguments about the dangers. The arguments against Trump were as pervasive as the right-wing Twitter presence. The one argument above all, the one regarding his mental competence, was met with a collective shoulder shrug among a clear majority of American men of all ages, especially men lighter than Pantone 9060.

We suspected these Trump voters were there. But they’re young. They’re worried about climate change. Right? Right???? Many of them at least gave lip service to various barriers faced by the disadvantaged. They complained about Biden’s age. Then voted for a man who can’t get a full paragraph out of his mouth without blathering insidiously about women, immigrants, or whatever else has tickled his daily grief goiter of a brain.

What bothers me isn’t so much that they voted for a Republican over my Democratic choice. It happens. What bothers me is that they voted for a nutcase.

Until the new administration makes its first moves toward fascism (does Trump naming Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff qualify?), we’re faced with being the opposition. That feels different than being part of a resistance. A resistance is something that rises against an imposed government.

Instead, we are in opposition to a voting majority who thought re-installing a terribly uneducated man to preside over the next pandemic or other major crisis was a good idea. This is the most difficult aspect of the election results. The people who voted for him live and work among us. That young guy selling you rock climbing equipment at REI or helping you navigate the world of mountain bikes probably voted for Trump.

Do they really hate women that much? This, too, sends shivers down my spine. It’s as if the participants in GamerGate¹ decided the election while we were sleeping.

As important as any potential resistance is, assuming the likelihood that this new Trump administration will feel empowered to engage its darkest forces, it’s equally important to address the fundamental educational issues that lead so many people into the kind of cognitive oblivion that gave us Trump 2.0. How do we accomplish this?

How do we urge people to learn, to read, to absorb material that helps them think?

I refuse to react to every Trump maneuver

I’m too exhausted, physically, medically, and mentally, to react to everything Trump does for the next year, two years, or four years, depending on how advanced his sickness is.

Trump has already done the one thing he does well: He’s named people to top positions who will probably be at each others’ throats from the first day. The mainstream press has billed Susie Wiles, who Trump named as Chief of Staff, as an expert clown car manager² who will help Trump stay focused on issues. But then he made renowned bigot Stephen Miller³ his deputy chief of staff. Trump loves a good fight between staff members enough that he probably sells tickets to recordings of their fights to his staff members. I doubt we’d ever know, because who’d admit to buying such a thing?

And Now I’m a Minority

I’ve never paid much attention to demographics. All this talk about white people like me becoming a minority has never interested me. I’ve just experienced a health crisis at an esteemed Atlanta university hospital, Emory⁴, where almost every health provider was a person of color. I only realized that fact when I started this paragraph and found myself thinking about how I am, indeed, a minority. But not the kind of minority MAGA fears becoming. I’m among the minority of voters who passionately opposed Trump. Many of us, no matter our ethnic background, are part of this minority. More people voted for Trump than didn’t. The most basic of statistics, a final vote count, bears this out. And it sort of stuns.

Now, I’m part of an opposition, rather than the resistance fighter we want to think we are. Oppositions are one of the most fundamental concepts of a functioning democracy. But I, like so many others, brainwashed myself by wondering how Trump ever polled more than 10 percent. I refused to believe the polls. I’ve never thought of myself as part of an opposition to the majority.

Where do I go from here? Where do we go from here? Giving up isn’t an option. It seems to me we need to take a page out of the Republican playbook and focus on local elections. We also need to promote education. By education, I don’t mean educating people on how to vote for our candidate. I mean educating them on how to think through things cognitively and not follow the lead of influencers, who generally know nothing.

When the Joe Rogans of the world are influencing a large mass of voters, we have a broken system. The easiest way to fix it is to give everyone smart pills. Since those don’t exist, we need to start pushing things like literature into the little tablets of our youngsters and using our parental powers to limit how much time kids spend staring mindlessly at the screen.

One way to start is by giving your kid a Kindle for Christmas. Yeah, I know, it feeds Bezos’ endless lust for money. It is what it is. These things are out of our control for an indefinite future. A wealth tax isn’t on the horizon.

The changes we need are fundamental. Everything is broken now. Half the country just re-elected a guy responsible for a million deaths, and the other half thinks that half is crazy. A reevaluation of everything is in order.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the nation somehow survives this. What ideas do you have to create a society where this can’t happen again?

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NOTES

I needed to keep this short. I’m on doctor’s orders to keep it light for my first few days out of the hospital. Thanks to all of you who sent well wishes. It meant a lot to me, even though it took me a while to respond.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)

2. A clown car manager is someone who limits access to Trump to help prevent one of his many meltdowns from spreading into the biosphere.

3. Meet Stephen Miller — the Last Man Standing

4. Emory has a fantastic reputation, and now I know why. They are incredibly thorough, and the nursing staff was universally attentive and kind. The doctors didn’t act rushed when they were talking to me about my issue. This was my first extended stay in a hospital. My only other visit was an overnight stay to clean up an ulcer. I felt confident that I’d be okay in the hands of the Emory staff. I was. I owe them a great debt of gratitude.