A vast swath of Americans are having difficulty falling asleep at night afraid if they snooze too long Trump will once again slither his way into becoming the president. Any good thought about him is such an anathema to these Trump-haters that many have severed their relationships, some of which were life-long, with friends and family members, on finding they were Trump supporters. Then there are their polar opposites. These people, no less in number, see Trump's taking the helm of affairs in Washington second only to the Second Coming of the Lord Himself. Glued to the TV from the minute they wake up to the time they fall asleep, they cannot get enough of praising his virtues to the like-minded, and rush to his rallies, often not even donning the mask, as if by such endangering of their lives they are enhancing the glory of his Godhood.
While diametrically opposite in their outward political behavior these two groups are identical at heart. They are moved by the same cauldron of hatred.
But this does not make sense. Are not the Progressives, who embrace every deviation as some form of welcome diversity are fundamentally opposite of the staid Conservatives who see in every change a step closer to America becoming the latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah?
That may be true but that kind of boiling hatred and anger can it be really provoked by the difference in political ideology? Is it possible that the hatred in American has reached such a high watermark that politics has become of such disproportionate importance? Perhaps it is not politics that is making the Americans so mad, it is because they are so mad that they are attracted to politics.
Americans are easily bored with humdrum existence. They are a restless people. People from all over the world who could not stand the routine way of life in the old-world gravitated towards America. Upward mobility and exploration of new vistas is in their DNA. But now there are no new lands to conquer. There is no West to explore and win. There is no slavery and the abolitionists and antiabolitionists to fight a Civil War. There are no World Wars left to go and rescue Europe from fratricidal madness. There are no Korean and Vietnam wars to halt the great yellow wave. There is no Soviet Union to do Cold War posturing. There are no Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and no Saddam Hussain to kick around. There is no Osama Bin Laden hiding in Afghanistan to invade and convert their lifestyles to reflect ours. They are whipping up their hatred of China, who, burdened by their own inferiority complex due to their physiognomy of slanted eyes and flat noses, are looking for adversaries to defeat and disprove it, but it has not reached the critical threshold to unburden rage.
Americans now have only themselves to attack and triumph over.
In the name of Trump, they are fighting with each other.
Once the World Wars were over and the Civil Rights Movement emerged which greatly lessened the scope of taking out of the collective surplus hatred upon each other and the blacks respectively, Americans relaxed the restrictive laws on immigration, and now they had people of all colors, arriving in droves, whom they could patronize, show the ropes, feel good about themselves by doing so, get mad at their Third World ways, shake their heads in disbelief over their crudity, and compete with each other to give these underdogs more benefits than their own selves. Unfortunately, the ones they allowed to come in hoping to feel sorry for them on at least some ground, these yesterday whipping boys are abandoning their preordained role and becoming economically more prosperous than the ones who viewed them first and foremost as economic refugees. Also, no good deed goes unpunished and no hatred is as great as the hatred that one feels towards one's benefactor who one no longer needs.
A great disgruntlement is creeping into the White America which took for granted they were cut above all other peoples. Interestingly the White Americans who live in metropolitan areas are holding their own with the immigrants and who still need the latter as conduits for feeling superior. But that is not true with rural White Americans who with their standard of living slipping down can see that the more driven non-white immigrants actually doing better than themselves. It is these people who find a magnet in Trump and his slogan of Make America Great Again. In which they see the echo of the call for making America parochial and white again, even if translates into becoming less prosperous than what they are now - for the entrepreneurship and energy of the immigrants in long run always brings greater wealth - since it did not carry the ignominy of being inferior to people of color.
While unbridled immigration is a major cause of the American schism, it is not the main one. The main one is the restless spirit of America. America invites the most ambitious and motivated people from all over the world. It is natural that those who are most talented are also the most frustrated and disgruntled and filled with barely contained rage because there will always be people who will get ahead of you no matter how talented you are if not for anything else because of one's aging. In this fight for and against Trump, it is just the quintessential American spirit dividing itself into two and fighting against its own self.
