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Progressives: You’re not going to learn anything from angry white voters

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Democrat vs. Republican on whiteThe media is telling progressives that a reason their side lost the 2016 presidential election is that they’re out of touch with the angry white voters who threw the whole shebang to Donald Trump.

The implication being, if you, as a good progressive, would just listen to the concerns of the angry white voter, walk a mile in their moccasins, then you could bridge the gap, have a Coke and a smile and teach the world to sing, preferably a verse or two of kumbaya, and the world is a better place as a result.

I’m going to save you the trouble. I was born and raised and still live among these angry white voters, and I’ve got a simple message for you straight from the lion’s den.

They hate you with the heat of a million suns.

I know this from experience. I was an unwitting, and unwilling, combatant in the culture wars long before we knew that we were at war.

My original sin as a kid growing up in Rural America was that I got straight A’s in school. You’d never guess what this led in terms of the names I would be called on the school bus.

Not that it needs to follow any logic, but one day I found Chris G. is a fag scrawled in ink beneath a window in the back seat of the bus that I rode to high school.

This for getting good grades, and also using the long bus rides from my trailer park to the high school to read books.

I know, good God, reading books, damn communist.

It started earlier than high school. At Thanksgiving dinner a couple of years ago, my dear mother, who passed away last year, told a story about the day the school called to tell her that she’d have to come to school to pick me up, because I’d been kicked in the head.

Mom, being a mom, fired off at the principal, the way she told the story, trying to find out what the hell had happened.

One kid held me down, and another kicked me in the head. This was in the third grade.

I remember arguing with my mom that I didn’t remember any of that happening, and she said it would make sense that I wouldn’t remember getting knocked out cold on the playground by two bullies.

And that wasn’t my first fight. Mom also filled me in about that first one – in kindergarten, when three kids tried to stuff me into a trash can, and I punched one of the kids in the nose and ended up being the one to get in trouble.

I didn’t go out for the football team or spend fall and winter days hunting. Not that I didn’t want to, but my mother wouldn’t let me. She did let me join the debate team, which worked out OK (I won two regional titles with my debate partner, and we were third in the state in the negative division as seniors).

She also let me join the Pop Quiz team, again, which worked out well (our team won a state championship and competed in a national tournament my senior year, memorable to me because it was held in Chicago, giving me the chance to see the Cubs play three games in Wrigley Field).

People who know me now, all these many years later, as a TV show host, sports broadcaster, award-winning journalist, published author, wouldn’t necessarily know that it all started for me in a single-parent home in a trailer park.

I carry the battle scars of being bullied every day for 13 years by these folks that the media types who have no idea what in the hell they’re talking about tell us we need to get to understand better.

What I can tell you about that is: you’re not going to get very far.

They hate you because of your book-learning, because you can converse in high-falutin’ words.

You know how you thought it was funny to point out how Trump seems to have a vocabulary of roughly a couple hundred words, one of which is bigly? Yeah, your snickers on that went over real well with these folks.

The very fact that you show interest in finding out what they think and why is viewed not as a sign of trying to bridge any divides, but rather as a sign of weakness.

You don’t learn things; you just know them. You don’t consider alternatives; you make decisions.

And trust me on this, they don’t care what you think. Whatever it is that you think on anything, it’s just because you’re biased.

Throwing aside the fact that we all have biases, of course. Don’t waste breath trying to explain that one out to its logical conclusion. Fox News has conditioned them to believe to their core that everything is biased against them.

That whole thing from Trump about the system being rigged? That’s code. Those straight A’s that I got in school – school was rigged. I don’t know how many times I was told that I might have book sense, but I had nothing in the way of common sense, as if the two are mutually exclusive.

I know what you’re thinking now that you’ve read this far. Chris, you’re telling us to give up on understanding these folks, so basically, what, we just write them off?

In terms of trying to get them to see the error of their ways, yes. I’ve butted heads with this all my life, and have spent literally decades trying to convince folks that they’re being played by the people they support with their votes in November, that if they vote Republican, they’re voting for people who might tell them they want to protect their gun rights and bring back manufacturing jobs, but really what they want to do is sell them guns and take campaign contributions from manufacturers who are intent on moving every job they can to Third World countries where labor is cheaper.

Go down the line: if you value banning abortion, why didn’t those people you voted into power do anything about Roe v. Wade when they had the White House and Congress for six years under George W. Bush? If you don’t like Obamacare, what about Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare?

There’s no reasoning here, because these folks are what I call cultural Republicans. This is the one part that the media narratives that have emerged the past few days have been getting right. They think you’re looking down your noses at them, and they don’t like you for that.

But here’s what the media folks have been missing on: that feeling is mutual, which is to say, they’re looking down their noses at you, and don’t care if you have a problem with that. And in fact, for all of your book learning and concern for the environment and such, they’re absolutely certain that they could kick your ass, and that the way you’re raising your kids ensures that their kids will be able to kick your kids’ asses

And that’s basically it.

So, save your breath, at least in this instance. Honestly, you’re better off engaging friends who are moderate Republicans and independents in terms of understanding how people who think differently than you see the world, and getting together with other progressives to lick your wounds, commiserate and strategize a response to the challenges up ahead.

If you still want to reach out to an angry white voter to learn for yourself what I’ve learned the long, hard way over the past 44 years, might I suggest instead going to the nearest brick wall and trying to dislodge it with your head instead.

You have a greater chance of success, and the headache won’t be nearly as severe.

Column by Chris Graham

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