I sat across from a woman in a car dealer’s lounge area the other day. Both of us were there waiting for our cars to be serviced.
"I am so sick of the election news”, she volunteered out of the blue. To be polite I nodded in the affirmative, but in truth I just wanted to get back to reading my book.
No such luck.
Without missing a beat, she used that comment to open the floodgates, and for the next fifteen minutes I endured listening to a livid Trump Republican toss out every racist cliché’, half-truth and immigrant hating piece of babble that has ever been chanted or preached at a Trump rally, including, but certainly not limited to, a Hillary-to-jail rant and a media conspiracy (sans Fox News) against the candidate.
I sat there nearly paralyzed; squinting at some remarks, nervously coughing at others and changing my position on my seat in cadence with each new diatribe. I’d read about this supposed 40-plus percent of our population, seen them on CNN Cable News, but never met one in the flesh until that morning. When she admitted that we certainly needed the Mexico wall, but it was naive to believe the Mexicans would pay for it, I excused myself and walked off to the showroom floor to escape. She was bright, articulate, certainly of some wealth and a retired professional.
They are out there, they’re Americans and I’m scared to death that so many of them have swallowed the poisoned Trumpkin pill.