{"id":22406,"date":"2018-06-20T10:52:26","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T17:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=22406"},"modified":"2018-06-20T10:52:26","modified_gmt":"2018-06-20T17:52:26","slug":"crossing-lines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=22406","title":{"rendered":"Crossing Lines"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"crossing<\/a>Donna\u00a0visited a friend\u00a0last night. Despite a mutual\u00a0agreement to avoid politics, conversation turned to the administration policy of taking children from would-be immigrant parents crossing the southern border of the US. Her friend … not for the first time … came down hard on the racist MAGA side: it serves them right; the kids are being used as props to garner sympathy; ask any Border Patrol agent and they’ll tell you the “parents” abandon\u00a0them in the desert\u00a0as soon as they cross over; it’s all part of an orchestrated plot to make Trump look bad, and so on. Donna came home angry and sad, and … not for the first time … said her friend was no longer the person she thought she knew and that she\u00a0didn’t know if she could\u00a0see her any more.<\/p>\n

We\u00a0faced a similar dilemma last December, when a couple we’ve known for 20 years invited us over for dinner.\u00a0These\u00a0friends have always been staunchly conservative, but more on the “country club Republican” end of the scale. Or so we thought. We were horrified when they turned out to be Trump supporters; going\u00a0out on a limb for him on Facebook before the election, then voting for him, then continuing to vocally support him through all the horrors of his first year in office. Here’s what I wrote then<\/a>:<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the thing: they voted for, and support, a cowardly bully and sexual predator, a man whose only values are wealth and celebrity, a man intent on cashing out everything of value in America in order to enrich himself and his cronies \u2026 a loathsome racist who, when Nazis took over an American city, chanting against Jews and blacks and killing a woman who protested their presence, literally took the Nazi\u2019s side. How do you rub up against shit without getting the stink on you?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I went on to recount a personal experience that still\u00a0sickens\u00a0me,\u00a0thirty-plus years later:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll never forget the time a young girl, 12\u00a0or 13 \u2026 about the age of my own daughter at the time\u00a0\u2026 walked\u00a0past\u00a0a restaurant table a friend and I were having lunch at, and\u00a0my friend\u00a0winked and said \u201cI bet she\u2019s tight.\u201d I\u2019d only been shocked like that once before, when I was a teenager myself and, out of the fucking blue, a middle-aged\u00a0guy across the aisle of a Greyhound bus leaned over and offered to suck me off in the toilet.\u00a0That time I changed seats.<\/p>\n

I wish I could say I got up from the table and walked away from the man who, out of the blue, revealed himself to be a pedophile. I can say I never spoke to him again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lumping Trump supporters\u00a0in with pedophiles may have struck some of my readers as over the top, but the comparison comes back to me in light of what’s going on today with Trump, Justice, Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, and Immigration & Customs Enforcement.\u00a0I was shocked to learn a person I thought of as a friend was a pedophile; I’m just as shocked\u00a0to\u00a0hear friends and acquaintances defend the\u00a0violent snatching of children and infants from parents trying to escape poverty and violence, and the incarceration of those children\u00a0and infants in cages and concentration camps.<\/p>\n

Last December,\u00a0dinner was postponed and we were able to put off deciding whether to continue\u00a0socializing with\u00a0our Trump-loving friends. Now, though,\u00a0a line has been crossed. Friends and acquaintances who still defend and support Trump are now former friends and acquaintances, and forgiveness is not in the offing.<\/p>\n

Up to, say, inauguration day, Trump voters could reasonably claim they liked his policies but rejected his racism and nationalism. If they still support Trump today they can no longer claim exceptions. They’re all in. They crossed the red line. They\u00a0done rubbed up against\u00a0shit and the stink ain’t ever coming off.<\/p>\n

Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all.<\/p>\n

This isn’t “politics.” This isn’t progressivism versus conservatism. It’s Morality 101. Sadly, though,\u00a0the political process is our only hope of changing things.\u00a0God damn it, friends, I know Democrats are spineless and uninspiring, but we\u00a0have<\/em> to vote the Republicans out this November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donna\u00a0visited a friend\u00a0last night. Despite a mutual\u00a0agreement to avoid politics, conversation turned to the administration policy of taking children from would-be immigrant parents crossing the southern border of the US. Her friend … not for the first time … came down hard on the racist MAGA side: it serves them right; the kids are being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,10,2,8,9],"tags":[482,1252,2554,2555,2024],"class_list":["post-22406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-personal","category-politics","category-war","tag-border-patrol","tag-dhs","tag-family-separation","tag-ice","tag-trump"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22406"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22417,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22406\/revisions\/22417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}