Facebook and Trump

The day before the election, I was walking with my daughter on our way to dinner and she asked me if I thought she would live to see 20. My daughter is 13. Why would a 13-year-old, healthy American girl ask such a question? As a father, can you imagine?

I stayed silent too long, stunned from the question. She continued, “I believe I will not live to see 20. I believe Trump will be elected president and it will be the end of America.” My first responsibility as a father is to keep my daughter safe, to create a world worth leaving her as inheritance. In one statement my daughter told me that she doesn’t believe I can protect her and that the world as she knows it won’t be worth living in very soon.

A week before the election I started deleting “friends” who were Trump supporters. Facebook friends called me closed-minded. They defended their people and their freedom to vote for who they wanted to vote for. Like a soldier who loses his taste for battle toward the end of war, I saw swinging a sword an exercise in futility. Here was a man running for president who mocked the physically challenged, promoted violence against people of color at his rallies, attempted to minimize the promotion of sexual assault as “locker room talk,” and at a time when white Christian males are the number one terrorist threat to America, he proposed a Nazi-styled corralling of Muslim-Americans.

I went to the Trump rally in Warwick, Rhode Island before the election and had to park the car blocks away from the event. When my friend and I exited the car, people were telling us not to even go down there. When we got there, we were turned away, but from the highway exit you could hear the crowd chant, “BUILD THE WALL!”

The week after the election, a Providence woman was walking to the store, and someone got close enough to her to whisper, “White Power,” in her ear. In Natick, Massachusetts, a man got three notes in his mailbox to stop bringing ni**ers into the neighborhood. Across the country there were over 400 reported hate crimes. In Michigan, students chant “Build that wall,” harassing Latino students. At the end of November, the number of reported Trump-related hate crimes grew to over 700.

I don’t consider myself closed-minded for deleting Trump supporters from my Facebook. Your vote for Trump doesn’t say you would commit a hate crime. It doesn’t say you will sexual assault my daughter. What is does say to me, though, is that if I fell victim to a hate crime, you would be okay with it because you voted that into office. With that thought, knowing your vote endorses a man who endorses violence, how can you honestly look me in the face and call me friend?