While sitting in the waiting room at the car wash the other day I overheard a large man swearing at the TV. “There’s that dumb SOB,” he said pointing at our newly inaugurated President. “Fucker. Nothing but a parrot.” The man was sitting in a chair next to a small woman. He poked her, “this is the beginning of another civil war. You watch. All those damn Biden and BLM signs all over the place. It’s gonna be a war, and you ask me? It’s not coming soon enough.”
The man was sitting in a chair next to a small woman. He poked her arm, “this is the beginning of another civil war. You watch. All those damn Biden and BLM signs all over the place. It’s gonna be the civil war all over again. And you ask me? It’s not coming soon enough.”
he was a guy who looked to not have many more years left on his shelf, and yet there was burning off his clock festering an anger so deep it had him dreaming of killing his own neighbors.
The man was in his sixties or seventies. Quite overweight. When it came time for him to get up from his chair to leave, the woman, grabbed him by the collar of his jacket while he pushed against the chair’s arms, his face turning red with the effort. In other words, he was a guy who looked to not have many more years left on his shelf, and yet there was burning off the clock festering an anger so deep it had him dreaming of killing his own neighbors.
I wondered if there was something I could do or say to break him a bit free for a moment or two.
But I just sat there.
I remembered my own reaction to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. I felt gut shot for months. Stumbling around in a place that no longer felt like the country I was born and raised. Each day, the news left me a little more angry, and quite a bit more drained— deportations, nazi rallies, deregulation of environmental laws, dismantling of the courts, of reproductive rights, of voting rights, of, of, of… Clearly there was a division in our country, a chasm wider than I’d ever imagined. But despite my grave reservation and even hostility toward our President and his arrogant actions and lies, never in the four years of the Trump administration did I imagine our sides engaging in a “war” against one another. Rhetorical sparring, sure, but not physical combat.
But here was a man at the car wash talking of “arming up.” I thought of how Dutch colonists had used division to create the Apartheid country of South Africa. By favoring one tribe over another — giving one more resources, better land, more water or special privileges , by depicting the “other” as evil or stupid or predatory, by lying and creating false conflicts, they would distract the tribes enough for the Dutch to control the country its wealth and its bounty. It’s an old story and it has been used to great effect throughout history. Distract the masses by making them hate on each other while despots and dictators break bread in their castles secure in the notion that their tidy lives can remain comfortably numb.
Freed from his chair, the man in the car wash followed his wife to the door. His walk was halting and he looked to be in pain. I wondered if he was a vet. If he’d once been in a car accident maybe, or if his work had been hard on his body, a logger, maybe a fisherman, a fireman, perhaps construction. Someone who had used his body to support his family, people he loved and prayed for, dreaming of a life a bit more cushioned – a bit more kind. I’m sure he considered himself a patriot. And I’m sure, had I told him I was glad Trump lost the election, he would think I was not.
Trump and his divisive rhetoric has whittled a trench deep into our country, and as I watched the man in the car wash walk away, I had no idea what I could have said to change that.
-Naseem Rakha – 1/21/21
