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I imagine there are some people who are already trying to
come to grips with the fact that by failing to vote for Hillary Clinton they helped make Donald Trump our
president-elect. As it becomes brutally clear what a mistake this was, their
numbers will grow. In a spirit of kindness and friendship, I would like to
offer some practical suggestions to those nonvoters/third party
voters/supporters of write-in candidates who, unlike Trump voters proper, may
have some residual capacity for shame, and might even nurse the secret desire
of someday doing something for the good of the world that might begin to make
up for the death, madness and horror they helped unleash.
1. Lie. No one
needs to know the truth about who you voted for. People who know will never
look at you the same way again. Every time a journalist is assassinated, every
time another hundred thousand jobs are lost, every time the coffins land at
Andrews from a war that started due to a Twitter beef, people will remember you
helped make it happen.
So lie. As of today, you supported Clinton, you voting for
her, despite whatever misgivings you may have had. Learn that story and stick
to it. This is not dishonesty but a necessary social fib. Telling people you voted for Jill Stein is the political equivalent of telling your spouse that their ass looks fat. If you want to do
something good in this world and maybe start to dab at the dogshit that is smeared
across your soul (never to be expunged completely), you will have to cooperate
with decent people to achieve anything. Decent people will never trust you if
they know what you are. Take the secret to your grave.
2. Don’t try to
explain yourself. So maybe you’ve already spilled the beans, and lying is
no longer an option. People know what you did. You’ve started to see the little
stiffness that comes into your friends’ manner when politics comes up when
you’re around. You’ve crossed the point of no return, but there are still
things you can do to limit the damage. Chief among them is to keep your rationalizations and excuses to yourself.
3. Seriously, whatever you do,
don’t try to explain yourself. Don’t whine about Bernie, don’t complain
about Clinton’s e-mails or whatever other non-scandal you used to justify
infecting our democracy with the human equivalent of tertiary syphilis. (Hey,
remember when he ran a fake charity and used it to buy a $25,000 portrait of
himself? That man will be the president. You built that!)
Newsflash: No one cares. No one cares why you enabled a man
who talks about American Muslims in 2016 with the same language Nazis used
about Jews in 1936.
Remember Star Wars? Remember Darth Vader? What a great
character! Remember when George Lucas thought we wanted three movies about how
this guy went from an annoying child to a whiny emo bitch to a child-killer?
Yeah, how he got that way was never the point. Normal people don’t give a shit
why you sided with evil. You did, and nothing you can say will make that
better. Just. Stop. Talking.
4. Do not try and
play both sides of the street. I would not believed it had I not seen it
myself, but there are some people so deranged that they will brag about how
terrible Trump will be and the part they played in bringing him to power, and
then complain that the democrats did, or didn’t do something or nothing to lose
his support and that of others like him (him because let’s be real here, it’s a
him.)
Pick a lane. If electing Trump is a bad thing, it is a bad
thing you helped bring to pass, and you with direct responsibility for the
outcome have no business lecturing the people who voted the right way about
what they might have done to gain your support. This is the moral equivalent of
a pedophile publishing a guide for six-year-old girls on what not to wear.
5. Do not try to
create a moral distinction between you and the people who voted for Trump,
based on the fact that you merely did not vote against him. No one cares
about the difference between the bank robber who shoots the teller and the one
driving the getaway car. If you want to open up a space between you and the
people cursing Muslims in the street and assaulting Jews, there is one and only
one way to do so;
5. Say you’re sorry.
Just that. Say you’re sorry. You were a fool; you made a terrible mistake; now
you want to work, humbly, alongside the people who made the right choice, to
fight Trump, the GOP, and inbred bigots in general.
I know that some of you are still deep into the process of
rationalizing what you’ve done and you may still think you can justify
yourselves somehow. Time will ultimately bring many of you to a realization
that no justification is possible, only a frank unqualified apology and humble
hard work. If that seems unappealing to you, remember #1 and lie for all you're
worth. Good luck.
