A friendly note to the Trump supporters out there

Last updated on: November 4, 2016 at 9:26 am by Dan Peterson

A friendly note to the Trump supporters out there 2016-11-04T09:26:31-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Sunset view from the back of the Seljalandsfoss waterfall, Suðurland, Iceland.
(Diego Delso, Wikimedia Commons, License CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Suggesting that I’m shallow, foolish, unthinking, self-righteous, irrational, not a real conservative, a closet Hillary-supporter, an idiot, indifferent to the fate of my country, a silly fan of Mork and Mindy, an enemy of the Constitution, a backer of socialized medicine, an advocate of a leftist Supreme Court, and so forth, and telling me that you’re “shaking your head” in weary disbelief at my country-destroying failure to support your guy isn’t a particularly effective strategy for persuading me to vote for Donald Trump.

Moreover, repeating such things over and over again doesn’t make them any more persuasive.

I won’t vote for Donald Trump, in any event. I’ve watched him carefully for years; barring something inconceivable, I won’t be convinced to change my settled evaluation of the man by anything over the next four days. I regard him as thoroughly unfit for the presidency.

It really would be better if you were to save your ministrations for those who might actually be persuaded. It’s a waste of your time and mine to tell me that, for example, while a vote for Trump isn’t really a vote for Trump, a vote for anybody other than Trump is actually a vote for Clinton. That argument is both tiresome and illogical, and it lost its freshness with me after, oh, maybe the first 16,837 iterations.

Just so you know.

Also: I think that there are things much more important than politics, and I don’t believe in losing friends over partisan political disagreements. Nor do I regard elections as scorched-earth wars of total destruction. If you feel otherwise, though — if, for example, you choose to “unfriend” me (as several have) over my refusal to support Donald Trump or to tell me (as one person has) that, because of my vocal opposition to Mr. Trump, you won’t stand with me in prayer — that’s entirely your right.

Last night, although we had tickets to the symphony, neither my wife nor I felt like going. But we wanted a change of pace (it’s been an unspeakably hectic and high-stress three weeks or so, but we finally got something of a breather at about 6 PM last night) so we went to see the film Hacksaw Ridge. (By the way, with the proviso that there’s a lot of violence and gore in it — not unexpected in a Mel Gibson film, but also essential, in my view, to an accurate understanding of war and to grasping the magnitude of Desmond Doss’s astonishing heroism — I highly recommend the movie.) It’s a film about standing by principles, even against strong (and not altogether mistaken) opposition. And I’m certainly not going to be bullied into violating mine by mere name-calling and popular pressure. The hero in Hacksaw Ridge, which recounts a true story from the Second World War, withstood a very great deal more than emailed insults and Facebook nastiness. I would be ashamed to cave in to much, much less.

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