Hanging With A Racist Trumper

IN NINETEEN EIGHTY I graduated with a masters degree in history, proud to walk across the stage and be handed my diploma in the presence of my father. I enjoyed the experiences perhaps more than any other stage of my education; the classes, the pleasant campus, the steady progress towards an advanced degree by learning fascinatiog European history. I had already been accepted into a doctoral program at another nearby university, and looked forward to one last summer of fun before getting really scholastically serious. I played a lot of tennis, partied, and spent a lot of time hanging out with a beautiful young lady, who was preparing to study to become a registered nurse, while her husband went to work to bring home the daily bread by driving a Coke truck. Our friendship lasted only for one summer,and their marriage lasted only five years, both doomed to temporary existence by basic incompatibilities. They had gotten married too young, before they were ready to settle down. Her fatal flaw was her unabashed racism, which shocked and appalled both her husband and me. The very sight of an African-American on television evoked slurs and slanders from her lovely visage, and I half expected her to throw wet toilet paper at the curved television screen. The active freindship endured only for that one summer. I moved away for more graduate school, she eventually divorced her truck driving husband in search of more affleunt marital pastures, and a couple of marriages later got what she had always wanted most; membership in America's upper middle class, where, if I am correct, she resides to this day. I hope and assume she is happy wih her corporate spouse of Japanese descent. Instead of becoming a nurse, she became a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, raking in the big bucks on the periphery of her initial chosen career. Ironically, coincidentally, she and her husband live near Aspen, Colorado, where I lived for a year while I taught night classes to the wives of millionaires at Colorado Mountain College. I kept my left wing Democratic party loyalty, and although I have no idea what she evolved into politically in our science fiction year of twenty twenty six, I suspect I have a good, wild guess. Your guess is as good as mine, the same as mine. I do recall tht in the election of nineteen eighty, she was going for Ronald Reagan, tellingly. I, dissatisfied with the moderate to conservative James Earl Carter, supported independent John Anderson, unwisely, unproductively. I am nearly one hundred percent certain that my lovely coulda been nurse became and is now solidly ensconced withtin MAGA nation, a rock solid supporter of the alleged fascist wannabe, Donald J.Trump, as an upper middle corporate class, MAGA Trumper. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it, and really, it makes no difference whether I ever find out, which I won't. When two people go in two different directions, and keep going, they end up universes apart. I'm sure I'll never see or speak to her again, but if by chance I happened to, the reunion would almost certainly be warmly cordial, which comforts me. She should be a Trumper, as I am sure she is. Its where she belongs. Those who support Trump should support Trump. It is where they belong. Their latent racism should, must be, and is expressed within a thin, transparent cloak of "freedom". "All comes out even when the day s done, and more even still when all the days are done", said Voltaire. In the fullness of time, we end up where we most belong. I belong on the Bernie Sanders left, my old friend on the Trump right. What matters most is that we are both happy, content with our choices. Our unspoken adversarial relationship can be and is manifested and expressed quite adequately, at the ballot box.