Some hard thoughts from our pal Luther Stiler.
Well.
Got that one wrong.
Like a lot of white people, I keep wanting to write things like “I did not realize I lived in a country this hateful.” I already Tweeted that my main mistake was underestimating the number of assholes in America. I genuinely didn’t think there were enough white assholes to elect Trump. That right there is a failure of empathy on my part; people of color and LGBTQ people and any number of others who aren’t straight cis white people have been telling us this for years, and while I thought I was listening I clearly wasn’t. America isn’t any different from what it was a few days ago. There’s just a whole lot of white people who can’t deny what America is any longer. The proof just got rubbed in our faces; it’s going to keep getting rubbed in our faces repeatedly for the…
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buildingapoem 
Many of us have struggled to understand why the election came out the way it did. The NY Times Public Editor flagged an article I found very helpful – George Packer in the Oct 31 New Yorker on Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt. Having lived “in the bubble” for 40 years in Boston and New York as an academic and then a minister, this article woke me up to the things that have been going on in e.g. the rural Midwest (where the election was decided). Three years in ME and NH since I retired and I had still not taken in what people in the now red rural areas were living through, and how much worse it became in the last 10 years. Parker is salutary read for a member of the “coastal elite.”
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