Yesterday’s Impeachment rally in Chico CA was a bit rocky. Things got heated and the police had to break up some fights between the rally attendees and some Trump supporters that showed up. I arrived after the fights were over. The downtown plaza was surrounded by police cars with their lights flashing. The crowd still in the plaza had dwindled from over 100 to around 60. I counted about 30-35 Pro-Impeachment and about 15-20 Pro-Trump supporters. The rest of the group 15-20 was at the edges of the plaza and appeared to be made up of the plaza regulars, the homeless that usually frequent the downtown area at night. My impression was that this group (the homeless) were somewhat put out that the protesters had taken over their plaza and caused the police to show up.
The Impeachers were scattered into smaller clusters of about 4-5 people each with their signs which were clearly home made. They had a variety of dress styles and hair lengths. Quite a few of the men had beards. There were young people in punk style and older people mostly bundled in their various coats and gloves. Not a baseball cap among them. They all seemed a bit bemused that the Pro-Trumpers had showed up for their rally.
The Pro-Trumpers were clustered into one group almost in a formation with a brash outspoken black woman as their alpha dog and point person. She was wearing a printed white sweatshirt that said “Black voters for Trump”. I didn’t know there was such a thing. It made me wonder who was paying her to be there and whether she was paid in dollars or rubles. There were two guys near the back of the vee shaped group with large American flags hanging limply over their shoulders. The others in the group were holding preprinted signs that said Trump/Pence and Trump 2020 and such. Several were wearing billed caps although I didn’t see any MAGA hats in the crowd. There was one home made sign that read,”Orange Man 4 Ever.”
It was clear to me where the lines were drawn. The Impeachers were the cats, speaking out for their right to independent thought and the rule of law. Not really wanting to be there, not really wanting to get too close to each other, but forced to take a stand as they felt their freedoms being threatened by the bulldog in the White House.
The Trumpers were the dogs, in a pack behind an alpha dog, carrying and wearing manufactured signs and shirts, spouting manufactured talking points. They were fiercely guarding their pack leader, Trump.
There was a loud debate between the pro-Trump alpha dog and one of the more outspoken Impeachment cats. You could clearly hear the alpha dog barking her Fox News talking points while the cat hissed back her counter points. The debate ended with the Impeacher cat walking away in frustration while the pro-Trumper dog barked epithets after her.
I was heart sick to see how divided my community is and how entrenched the Pro-Trump people are in spite of personal evidence of Trump’s betrayal of our region. We are still suffering the consequences of the devastating fire that wiped out our neighboring city one year ago. Trump wanted to withhold the FEMA funds for the fire recovery just because our state (California) wanted to remain in compliance with the Paris Climate Accord and to treat immigrants with dignity. It didn’t matter to him that most of the people in this part of Northern California had voted for him. He did to us what he did to Ukraine, he withheld funds because we wouldn’t go along with his ill-conceived political agenda. When he visited the fire scene he couldn’t even be bothered to get the name of the town right, calling it “Pleasure” rather than its actual name of Paradise. He was totally willing to use our disaster aid as a pawn in his power game. And yet the Trump supporters (Trumpets?) are as loud and obnoxious as ever.
I saw this same denial of the facts growing up in Virginia. There my class mates showed me their parent’s stash of Confederate money which they were saving for when the South would “rise again”. This was 100 years after the Civil War was over. The South will never rise as long as its people are kept poor and ignorant. But that doesn’t seem to lessen the unearned sense of entitlement so many Southerners have. Just as with the Trumpets, they seem to revel in the feeling that they are the victims of history rather than seeing that they are the authors of their own suffering.