Lovingly Dogging Juan

 MY NEIGHBOR is from Guatemala, and I have repeatedly told him that I speak only to white people, that hs should consider returning to his own country, and that brown and black people are second, third, or fourth class citizens in America, take your pick.  I tell him that I must make America great again, like it was before his arrival in this country, and that I must hurry, before the current president leaves office, assuming he does. I am joking, of course, and we both laugh hard, being easily entertained. I would rather make jokes about our nightmarish American racism than cry about it. For good people, ignoring it is not an option .Often one of us will suddenly shout: "Long live the president"! (Trump). and the other will respond: "Somewhere far away"! It cracks us both up, every time, no matter who says which line. I don't get to see Juan as often as I would like, because he has a family and a full time job owning his own home renovation business, and I am retired. He rebuilt my crumbling deck. Juan reminds me unintentionally, how fortunate we are, having people like him coming to our country and improving it. I often tell him that he needs to quit his job, because his boss is a slave driving asshole. Again, we laugh. We laugh at anything, at Trump, whom we both despise, and mostly at ourselves. it beats crying. He has often remarked that much of what Trump does and says reminds him of a Latin American dictator. "This is worse than Guatemala" he has said several times. The thought has occurred to me how wonderful it would be if Trump supporters and evangelical Christian Trump supporters and I could get along as well as Juan and I, if we could simply joke and tease each other about our differences, instead of taking ourselves of seriously. I have often said that I despise Trump supporters, particularly evangelical Christians, eighty percent of whom still support Trump even at the end of the most corrupt presidential administration in American history. To me, for any true Christian espousing the values and messages of Jesus Christ to support a person like Donald trump is simply inexcusable, deplorable, and all kinds of other bad things. I often remind Juan that he chose to emigrate to the mother of all racist countries, when he sadly tells me that often people seem to dislike him because of his Latino accent, his dark skin, assuming that he might be an illegal immigrant, which he is not. I remind him that the rest of us , like he, are forced to live among right wing evangelical Trump supporters. he himself is an evangelical Christian, which give him a unique insight into the bias against folks like him. I haven't asked him how well he gets along with the right wingers at his wife's Pentecostal church; I probably won't. I really don't need to know.