The Night I became a Trump Deplorable

I was walking along Sixth Avenue in the heart of Greenwich Village one evening in 1970 with my long time girl friend, enjoying the lights, the crowds and good feelings.  When a few yards in front of me, I noticed a man, a black man who appeared from nowhere, who was carrying what I have to describe.  It was a device of the time; we called them skate boards,  a skate nailed to both ends of a five foot base of wood, with a crate in the front.  But he was holding it from the back, and swinging it so the front with the crate gave heft to the roller skate.  He was disheveled and maybe staggering a bit, and was swinging it as he was walking forward into the crowded sidewalk.  People started to run, but then he was approaching a girl who had not noticed him.  He was using his board like a batter at the plate, with this girls head being a ball that he was about to demolish.  My reaction was instinctive, a shout that stopped traffic, “Watch out” -— in time for the girl to turn, see what was coming and sprint away. 

The man heard it too, and saw where it was coming from.  He pivoted and started walking towards me, as he came closer positioning the skateboard with each step, until with his weapon ready to swing at me, I raised my arms to deflect the blow  and we locked eyes, with mine imploring him, “why --  why are you doing this.”  And then rather than fracture my arms or worse,  he threw down his crate, and walked away into the crowd.   

Then as my fear subsided,  the first thought that flashed to mind was guilt.  Guilt, that in this almost all white crowd, I had somehow done harm to a disturbed black man.  This quickly faded, to be replaced by a realization, a crystallized thought,  that today four decades later provides a window on those who in the next month could possibly bring fascism to this country.  I thought,  “What kind of a world am I living in where my possibly preventing a homicide would leave me feeling like I’m a racist.  And how far does this white guilt go.  If I had been deterred by this doubt a second longer I would have found out for sure whether the board wielder was just joking around, or whether he would have completed his swing at the girl with lethal results.”  

I’m not sharing this on my liberal web site, where sympathy for diehard Donald Trump supporters is not expected to be welcomed because as both sides of this election agree, if the other side wins our country will be devastated.  Maybe I should risk it, since I am among those who abhor what Donald Trump represents, the distortion of conservatism known as the alt-Right, perhaps insight from my own experience may provide a key for a few to interact across the deepening divide.  

For those few seconds I was in a position of what a cop does on a regular basis, as it’s his/her job to confront those who could be a lethal threat to others or himself, or then again could be just acting in a bizarre way.  My life has been different, as I avoid putting myself in such situations, and if I do find myself in a high risk setting I can walk the other way.  Because of this, I can indulge myself in believing  that I could never do what some cops do,  kill someone who is not about to cause harm to anyone.  I can take comfort that I am always humane, and certainly not one who would respond differently to one race from another.  

This election is changing our country in a way that won’t be reversed after the votes are counted and we have a President elect.  Our focus on the candidates of this single election avoids the need to have understanding of the other side, all the more so to the degree that you view them as contemptible.  What I shared here of my feelings close to a half century ago, could have, with some small changes in my own life events,  put me on the other side, admiring Donald Trump as the flawed savior of this country.  He would have been the person liberating me from that guilt that had burgeoned to be an oppressive ubiquitous force that only he would challenge.  

In sports it may be true that winning is the only thing that matters, but it’s not that way with a complex society as disparate as ours in every way possible.  And we are only one of many other countries, for which an impervious wall of protective isolation is more and more inconceivable.  For one to aspire to the position of President of the United States, he/she must have at the least an element of delusional megalomania.  The escalating challenges should give any rational person pause, knowing that the best that can be done is the very un-heroic kicking the can down the road for a few more decades, with the hope that somebody else will come along to do the same.