The same day that I read Hunter's (excellent) Piece on Steve King and his Muslim-hating verbal defecations, I took the car to get the oil changed, and while sitting in the waiting room, chatted with a man who revealed quite a bit about himself. He's 81 years old, has three children and four grandchildren, retired in 1992, has a fifteen-year-old car that he takes good care of (but had some vibration on the highway that led him to buy a new tire that the dealer charged him $200 for). Winters are getting hard on him but his wife doesn't want to move south, even though his kids live in Tennessee and Kentucky. He lives on a street that's been torn up for sewer repairs; and he complained about the blasting at the quarry that lies between our houses. I told him that the blasting had stopped because they're filling the quarry in now. Then he said, "They should fill it with Muslims." And when I didn't react, he repeated it. "They should fill it with Muslims."
When they say someone's "jaw dropped," they probably could have used a picture of me to illustrate. I just said, “uh….” Then stopped talking and went and looked out the front window of the oil change place until he left. I hope he knew how I reacted to that, and I pray he was ashamed of himself. I probably could have told him off but was afraid my temper would get the better of me. So I’ll have to hope that my icy silence sent the message.
It’s one thing to read about the crap that right-wing "news" sources and websites spew 24 hours a day, but it’s another to hear what it does to the people I see every day in the community I live in. People whom I would otherwise think of as decent people, nice neighbors, and upstanding citizens. All I can hope is that the generation now entering adulthood won't fall for demagoguery and hate mongering the way his generation has. The fact that this man would spout such casual hate to a person he just met is kind of creepy. I’m sure he thought I looked like the kind of person who would agree with him, since I’m white and over 60. Maybe age has impaired this man’s “filter,” but (as a drunk Mel Gibson illustrated) a person with a poor filter just says what they’re already thinking. Maybe this man (who was a kid during most of WWII) learned to assume that it’s always easy to tell who the bad guys are (you know, the Japs and the Krauts).
But you'd think that four-fifths of a century of living on this Earth would have imparted some wisdom and some human decency to his generation. I guess for a lot of them, there was no chance to actually know anyone who was anything other than white Christian blue-collar people, and for some of them, I'm becoming depressingly suspicious that there was precious little human decency there to begin with. So for whichever combination of reasons, they're easy suckers for the likes of Steve King, Louie Gohmert, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and especially The Dump.
The other thing that blows me away is that this guy (based on the demographics of my town) probably worked at either Reynolds Metals or Electro-Motive, probably as a supervisor or skilled tradesman. He made enough to buy a nice little house, retire at 58, and buy a Cadillac in 2000. And yet he probably voted for Rauner, the guy who’s doing everything he can to eviscerate the middle class, hand the wealthy more breaks, and kill organized labor. Ironic.