
Maybe he's happy. He's always glad to see me in the bar and shakes my hand and I always ask how he's doing, and he's always doing great, but maybe he's not, because he's getting pretty wasted and my instinct tells me that although he's still working, there's doubt domestic situations are well. Just a hunch.
Anyway, it's hard to get mad at this kid, because he's essentially jovial and generous and kind, even if he likes to piss off whomever is easily riled by bragging about the Trump sticker on his truck, and also using the N word about Obama, even though he has never been around any black folks, as San Luis Obispo County and especially Cayucos is sanitized gleaming white.
But the Trump sticker and the general mindlessness of this kid (who very possibly didn't even vote) who is actually intelligent but coerced by his peers and environment to allow himself to spew thoughtless lies and hatred, stuck in my craw, because I like this kid and don't wish to ostracize him like I do a lot of people and old friends on a higher level of education and political sophistication who know Trump is a piece of excrement and bad for the country but voted for him anyway and continue to back his divisive policies and rants.
Fuck them.
But this kid? He's a stunted working stiff, reminds me of some of the kids I served with in the army, guys from the end of the line, who worked in steel mills and coal mines or textile mills or at whatever they could find in in the south and Midwest, guys I secretly admired because they were so much more adaptable to the army and could deal better with the hardships of army life. Hell, many of them were already ensconced in the brutality of a lifetime of debilitating labor before they ended up in the army, while I had some college and was a reader with a political conscience driven home by Roosevelt liberal democrats.
I got on well with these guys, who didn't give a hoot about politics. But I wonder where they are now, as old men, and do they wear the “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” caps and place those stickers on their pickups? Most interesting, are their progeny (also brought up in mills and mines or union backed industries now dwindling to near nothing), out of work, humiliated, viciously angry, sad, bored, largely ignorant of the world around them, buying into Trump and screaming like former happy people reduced to cavemen, to subhuman abominations calling for Hillary to go to jail and in some cases her death?
Are their fathers those sagging old goats often seen wearing their now popular military ball caps when not wearing the Trump caps and voicing their grumbling through Sean Hannity on Fox? These old goats, who were once my brothers in arms, probably fly their flags out front of their middle class homes. Maybe they fly from their pickups. Maybe a lot of them are just plain dead or crippled from the debilitating nature of their jobs. But I see a lot of them around here, suddenly patriotic and scowling at the idea of Obama and now gloating that Trump is in charge, a real man, a tough guy, even if he was a heinous coward and draft dodger too good to dish the dirt with their like, more of a celebrity guy bedding down the luscious high-end women we all fantasized over while doing the dirty work and paying for hookers.
Did any of these guys actually vote before the onslaught of Trump? Was it Trump who ignited the subhuman abomination in their characters? Yeh, the once “Donald” but now President, managed to find a fissure in their psychological makeup and exploit it, and extend it to their progeny and ignite an entire populace of America, a populace democrats now feel they must cater to, which is saying they must cater to white subhuman abominations to get back in office.
What they should know is that these people don't even give a fuck about voting or much of anything past somebody who might make THEIR lives better and stir things up, make things entertaining, and while they are at it maybe kick some ass! Start showing these immigrants and Muslims and European pussies and academic eggheads we mean business, we're king of the hill, when anybody with any perspective on history knows we're about to burst apart at the seams and place the entire world in extreme duress.
The progeny of my generation want their jobs back. They want the old mines and mills and manufacturing that peons work for in poverty stricken states so THEY can buy at Wal Mart, but it's all over, guys, you're anachronisms in the system, under educated and unfit for employment in the new tech world, and if you do find jobs they will be more fit for the Latino immigrants you want run out of the country, much less the wages that will be truly humbling with the devastation of unions and new power Trump will give to corporations to squeeze the life out of your wages while they grow richer.
Only then (right now Trump CAN shoot somebody in the streets and they'll applaud), only when they realize their votes for Trump backfired and they are faced with the oblivion of uselessness and idleness and illness and extreme poverty in the greatest country in the world, will their subhuman abomination really take hold, and by then it will be too late.
This kid in the bar, he's never been out of the county, never been in the military, never been out of a job, not yet fallen ill without health insurance...just wait.” You ain't seen nothin', kid,” as my father always reminded me about the Great Depression.