Like my best friend when I was eight, I'm having to re-teach myself the use of language. There are certain words commonly used in a strictly metaphorical sense that would no longer be understood that way where I to use them.
We can't, for instance, speak any more about "fighting for what we believe in", which is an extremely common rhetorical turn of phrase. We do that, and the next time some dumb-shit self-proclaimed "anarchist" who thinks Guy Fawkes was a comic book character punches a cop it winds up on us somehow.
Similarly, in America for the past fifty years (thanks LBJ) there has apparently been a war on against every damn thing imaginable, up to and including the Country Music Awards. Not only are we necessarily _not_ at war, but we can't safely make any comparisons to war, or to anything that happened during the course of one. I imagine myself as one of those sorts of parents who won't let their children play with toy guns. "We don't use the 'w' word in this household, Bobby."
Ehh, it's fine. Maybe it'll teach me to be a better writer. Maybe I'll start using fewer cliches and lazy analogies, and all those historical allusions are more clever than they are useful for anything.
In a lot of ways we are consciously indebted to the tactics the Republican Party has employed over the course of the last generation, both because they have proven effective and because they are the ones setting the rules of discourse. This does not, however, mean being blindly imitative. I personally think it would be stupid and wasteful to turn up the paranoia machine to the extent that they did to us. We do not need to exaggerate in order to create a constant atmosphere of fear and distrust. That's going to be the new regime's job. All we have to do is loosen the iron grip they're going to attempt to hold on it.
Fear spreads. Tell someone to be afraid of someone or something else often enough, persuasively enough, and they will start to also be afraid of you. Basic Pavlovian psychology. You become associated with the fear response. You think Churchill lost the election after winning World War II (whoops) just because he was a shitty campaigner?
So we let them take the lead. Donald Trump isn't President yet, hasn't done anything yet, and after 18 months of working tirelessly and ineffectually to persuade everyone I know that Trump presents a serious and unacceptable threat to human rights and to America's Constitutional principles and traditions, I'm ready to take a break. The cheap heat regularly churned out by outrage factories like Occupy Democrats is of absolutely no use to us. We reject and spurn it. Stuff like Harry Reid's executive summary of the obstacles any person of conscience faces in attempting to work with the future Trump administration are much more helpful.
Because people I know keep talking about "healing" and "building bridges". I'm not convinced spewing out the same meaningless glad-handling everybody trotted out after the last two elections is going to accomplish anything more than it did in 2008 or 2012. I think if you want to build trust you should perhaps consider cutting back on the empty words and focusing on saying things you sincerely believe, whether or not those things have been focus-group tested to win friends and influence people.
I believe we should spend this time, rather than continuing to focus on building our outrage against Trump, or pretending to make peace with him or his supporters "for the good of the country", on helping and supporting each other. Protect those who need protection, learn how to shut down or avoid bomb-tossers and learn how to not sound like a bomb-tosser, work to forgive each other for all the stupid shit we're inevitably going to thoughtlessly say to each other.
