I am not sleeping. I am questioning many of my friendships and I am pissed off. I must get this off my chest so I can sleep. I apologize in advance for the length of this, and I sincerely hope that at least one person can offer me a sane piece of advice other than “step back from the keyboard” after reading what I have to say.
[details=My cathartic rationalization for where my brain is at post election 2016 ]“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
This inscription on the Statue of Liberty has encapsulated my being for a significant part of my life. When I ask myself why, I am filled with so many positive examples and interactions with people from all over the world, and with many people who have found new lives living in the United States.
A large part of this I owe to Intel. Working at a large multi-national corporation, it is a daily reminder walking down the halls or eating in the café, or travelling to many of Intel’s world sites. I am not going too far out on a limb in proclaiming that I likely know more people who have immigrated than I know who are natural born citizens of the United States. I have helped a number of people gain their citizenship – and to hear stories of their past which reinforces why this country is so great. Probably the most tortured story is of a woman, who with her mother, escaped Vietnam on a large freighter they believed was going to carry them to the US shores only to have the ship’s crew turn on them after land eclipsed below the horizon. They had sold everything to buy their freedom and carried with them all they had left – as hundreds of others had done on the ship. The crews plans of killing all the passengers and dumping their bodies overboard and stealing their possessions was thwarted by a brave few. After dispatching the captain and the crew, they spent harrowing weeks on the open sea, with nothing to eat except for what they carried for several weeks – the captain knew he was only going a short distance and provisions and a full fuel tank were not needed. They were fortunately rescued, and eventually came to the US where they became citizens. She reported to me for several years and this story just reinforces what a beacon the United States is to so many.
Other examples abound – travelling to India, and being surrounded by hundreds of people who want to shake my hand or have their picture taken with me. Beaming with pride, they clamored for a nickel or quarter just to have a real authentic piece of America. Or maybe I manufactured that as two-bits could be a half-day of wages. For me, I frequently travelled with a roll of quarters and rolled up ones which I used for small tips and trinkets which gave so much happiness in the eyes of the recipients who fondled these. The US dollar is the world currency. It is accepted everywhere. That is a point known only those by travelers.
Going to Vietnam for almost a month, sponging up so much history and being welcomed by so many outstanding friendly Vietnamese, I came to love this country we thought we were defending when in fact were taking sides in a large civil war. Opening their borders only 20 years ago, the friendly reception I received travelling the length of their country continues to demonstrate how much the vast majority of people look up to the United States.
I hired several Mexican laborers over the course of several years when I built my house. To drive down to the cultural centre, and pick up a few for a weekend’s work, I came to have huge respect for their work ethic as I worked alongside them. Then I find out that they are staying in a shack, with 8-10 guys in bunk beds and paying $1,500 USD a month for the privilege, so they could send money back to their family in Mexico. My command of the Spanish language matured to that of a 5 year old, replete with many construction terms. Years later, we vacationed in Mexico almost on a yearly basis. While avoiding the large noisy tourist towns, we spent weeks in small towns such as Guayabitos. It always amazed me as I encountered so many Mexicans who had resettled back in Mexico after a few years in the US. This turned out to be the norm, as more people return to Mexico each year than who try to cross our borders. Look up it up. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-coming-to-the-u-s/
I manage(d) several off-shore teams in India, Malaysia and Costa Rica. To come to the US is considered a reward unmatched by any monetary reward or plaque. Learning and having a command of the English language elevates any citizen of these countries to near the top of the social caste. For English speakers get the better jobs and opportunities.
I could go on for pages of my encounters in other countries. I have travelled both for business and pleasure and it never ceases to amaze me of how friendly much of the world is towards US citizens.
The preceding page hopefully illustrates my mindset and how with great remorse, woeful introspection and downright disgust that I have generated when we have elected a president such as Trump. He does not stand for how this country was founded and how many immigrants have come to its shore.
Looking back at the process that got us here (as a non-affiliated voter who has no voice in the primary process as I refuse to register either Democrat or Republican), I have come to several opinions of both sides.
First off, the message that Hillary is part of the establishment was only magnified by the DNC’s decision to anoint her as what can only be described as the sole candidate. Bernie wasn’t even a democrat. I honestly believed that the only reason he was out there was to give Hillary someone to actually debate against – and he almost won! I believe that this decision by the DNC was made back in 2008 when Barack beat her and chose her as Secretary of State. I think if the Democrats had ran with a broad field of people like the Republicans had, and if Hillary had won that, then at least a lot of people may have believed they had participated in the process of electing her. As it was, the DNC took that privilege away, forever labeling her as part of the institutional problem. And it stuck.
Conversely, when the Republicans ran such a huge field of wanna be’s, I was truly flummoxed as Trump began running and spouting his nonsense about building walls, calling Mexicans rapists and murders, and calling to ban all Muslims from entering the country, I scoffed at the idea that this great country would elect such a person. I even made a bet (that I lost and would continue to lose with him being President) that he wouldn’t make it out of the primaries. The man lacks decency.
How did this happen? There are lots of reasons people voted for the man, or against Hillary, but why did so many grasp at the words so vehemently against our founding?
Back in the early 90’s, when the internet was first taking off, I predicted that at some point, the common man could be elected without spending a great deal of money by being able to get their message across. I was right and wrong. Trump is about as far as you can get from the common man, but for anyone to dismiss the critical role that the internet played in electing him, you are missing a great history lesson.
To my great regret, the epiphany of the role that the Internet played can be seen in what I can only term my great mistake in joining Facebook this year. To give a little bit of a background, even though I had not spent 5 minutes on Facebook since its inception, all the beacons pointing to it from google, amazon, or anywhere for that matter is impossible to miss. I came to loathe it and agree with the term “If you’re getting the product for free, then you are the product they are selling”.
This past year, I found I was out of the loop on several things and kept hearing “Did you see what so and so posted on facebook”, or “well I put out the invite on Facebook” and decided to dip my toe into the water.
My initial reaction was “ok, this isn’t so bad” as I got to reconnect with some awesome people that I hadn’t talked to in decades. It became kind of fun, finding out what people were up to. It was like a reunion of sorts.
This honeymoon would quickly fade as I grew tired of the crap that was being forwarded and liked by so many people. The term “signal to noise ratio” describes useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange. Facebook has a very low signal to noise ratio, meaning that most of what I was seeing was just reposting of things that people found funny or alarming with the vast majority of it being false.
I white-nighted some of these falsehoods, but it soon became a losing cause and not worth the trouble. My frequency of posting and reading declined over the months. But then the election came upon us.
Seeing the vile and untrue memes making the rounds, propagated by so many people ate at my core. I gave up on trying to educate and correct people, and for those where I did try, it was a really bad decision as I have come to the conclusion that it impossible to stop the tidal wave. Coincidentally, fond thoughts of some friends had begun to deteriorate at an alarming rate. I began unfollowing a lot of them.
I like discourse. I would like to have an honest conversation, but what I found is that people don’t want that. They want to post memes of pictures they agree with and ask for likes. Instead of offering up any semblance of discussion, people are becoming the twitter of our generation, only able to speak in sentences of 140 characters or less and usually 20 characters or less.
Examining these memes, and reading about how there are literally armies of people out there creating these memes and getting them circulated, my heart grew ever darker as the summer wore on. “How can people possibly believe the BS that they are posting?” when only a cursory amount of research is required to discount what they are purporting as true?
It is my opinion that the phrase “If you repeat it often enough it will become true” was hammered into so many people’s psyches, these falsities took hold. I was disheartened as I witnessed conspiracy theories against Clinton completely overshadow actual video taped recordings of Trump saying cringe worthy things only the day before. (for the record, I am not talking about the famous pussygate, but the hundreds of horrible things he said on a daily basis – and when challenged, often he dismissively said “I didn’t say that”. You only have to play the video to see his is lying). People were putting more stock into whispers than what was being laid out right in front of their face in video form.
I blame Michael Moore. He proved decades ago that assembling facts in a coherent narrative can make your mind believe additional things that are not explicitly called out. He will never admit to saying false things, and for the most part, they are defensible – he puts together an adjacent set of true facts in a timeline that causes your brain to put 2 and 2 together and they add up to 7 and you believe it.
The drone armies of Palmer Luckey and Putin learned from Michael Moore and manufactured thousands of memes and catchy phrases and threw the seeds to the winds of Facebook. And boy did they take hold. Like a dominoes falling into an intricate pattern, they spread across the landscape of friends and family.
By and large, the memes of Clinton’s supporters only reinforced their own world belief or would fall upon the false premise of trying to show people how bad Trump was by quoting his own words when this had failed time & again.
Shaking my head became a daily ritual as I was torn apart witnessing so many people falling prey to this obvious manipulation.
The biggest problem with this is the trust that people placed in their friends and families. This is Facebook’s money making machine. Instead of having ads that randomly appear, a simple “XXX likes this” will cause more people to click on an ad because if they liked it, it must be cool so their click-rate ad revenue skyrockets the more they can get you and your families to be the pitchmen for all the products you already buy.
This time it is not products, but your opinion and how people started to spread this negativity and outright falsehoods amongst good decent people caused them to doubt. They doubted whether Hillary was better than Donald Trump. Of course there are enough people who tried to shout from the roof-tops, but like a train that blows its horns frequently, the mind begins to dismiss these. Instead it was the wide variety of negative memes because it wasn’t only your friends, but the things your friends liked & commented on that reinforced this negative world view.
Earlier in this diatribe, I started off with my negativity with Hillary and how the DNC anointed her for a reason. There are enough of these ‘facts’ out there that are true (she called many of Trumps supporters Deplorable was another huge misstep) and combined with an avalanche of memes that sprinkled false narratives, many people began to subconsciously manipulate 2+2 to equal 7.
As a result, have many people decided to either vote for Trump or stay away from the Election, Trump was elected.
Trump supporters were in a bubble of misinformation and Hillary supporters were in a bubble of overconfidence. Together they combined to nominate a person who ran on a platform that should bring tears to anyone reading the Statue of Liberty.
You were trolled America. Congratulations.[/details]