I’ve always lived among my own kind, which is humans, cats, dogs and the birds I feed in my yard. You can see someone who is a member of all those species if you look out the window of the apartment I live in, a second-floor apartment in the three-floor apartment building I own.
If you look out the window at other times of the day, you can see the African-American family next door, the Portuguese immigrant on the other side, and the Cape Verdean family living in the house just in front of mine. My house is sort of, but not quite behind the house where the Cape Verdean family lives. We build ’em close together and in odd configurations here in these old Northeastern cities.
I hasten to add that I have not been killed by any of my neighbors, though the night is young.
And I know people, I know them very well, who live in suburbs where you couldn’t see a black family if you had a telescope.
Those people, and they are nice suburban people, most of them, are living in a place Donald Trump would not find comfortable. Despite his appeal to their bigotry, Trump doesn’t have much experience living among white Americans who drive used cars, or even once-new cars that are now three years into five years worth of payments. He only knows that the dumb bastard kids of those people keep joining the military, if only to get the few pennies in benefits they’ll need to attend junior college.
Junior college! Three-year old cars! I have $28 in my pocket right now, and I’d give every wrinkly bill of it to get Donald Trump on a city bus, maybe the one that takes workers out to the Amazon warehouse in the industrial park.
And, of course, President Roosevelt was a rich man, I’ll be reminded, as was President Kennedy, yet I think either one of them could have made better talk with the bus-riding warehouse workers than could Trump.
And what would Trump think of the single moms taking the bus to work, women who love well but not too wisely, who change the diapers of the elderly at nursing homes and who have, sometimes, a really girlish tendency to wear more makeup than is strictly necessary.
And what about the young men, the ones with hard tubes of muscles in their arms and a “THUG LIFE” tattoo, the ones who can back every word with a punch, but who will never make 80 years old, dying of wounds inflicted in Afghanistan and Chicago? That’s easy. Trump would be scared of those boys. In the old days, when Trump owned a number of casinos, security would have watched those boys.
They’d be right to watch them, too. No telling what they’ll do, all hopped up on being poor.
Some of them fall right off the bus, take to wearing a skirt, maybe something with sequins. They call themselves “transgender,” and the only good thing about them is, even after they put on the skirt, they STILL want to join the military and pick up a little junior college money.
You gotta suppress those young men. You gotta keep ’em out of the military, lest they become heroes. The other reason is that, confronted by the idea of transgender people, Trump and his wrinkly buddies aren’t sure where to grab them, not at all.
You can hardly grab them by the (insert famous word here), can you?
Faced with this problem of how to grope the unwilling human in a skirt, the Trump administration freezes, and then strikes out in righteous country club locker room anger.
I’ll tell you one thing. If the doctors of the Vietnam War era had been less susceptible to influence, if the military had been more open to the transitionally bone-spurred, there is every chance Trump would have found himself in a skirt, warbling the score of “Oklahoma” to a horrified draft board.
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