Had a million great blog topic ideas earlier, can’t remember any of them now, so you nice people get treated to what happens when I freestyle is by directing my train of thought right onto the page and leaving you, the reader, awash in my stream of consciousness. up to your knees.

Hope youi brought your waders.

So let’s talk Trump. Specifically, how to deal with him.

Trump is a spoiled brat. And I know the cure for bratty children, and that is to ignore them when they are behaving badly and only pay attention to them when they are being good little boys and girls.

The basic brat modus operandi says “I can make you pay attention to me and make everything revolve around me by being bad!”

That is Trump’s formula and it’s working flawlessly. Like any brat, he knows exactly what to say to get him the attention he craves and that is practically his sole motivation for saying them : to make everything about him.

And lo and behold, he’s all people talk about. He dominates the news. The entire media pipeline is flooded with people talking about him. And he loves it.

Any brat would.

The cure, were this possible, would be for everyone to ignore him unless he is being good. People would have to break their Trump addiction and give up being constantly dazed and outraged by the brat’s latest outrage. That would risk actually waking up from your Trumped out state and realizing that you are part of the problem and doing your part to be part of the solution.

I do not know how one goes about convincing billions of people to kick a socially acceptable addiction, though.

After all, it’s fun. There is a reason that nothing goes viral like outrage and that’s because getting good and mad about stuff is very cathartic. You get to vent all your latent frustration and rage at a deserving target and there is no risk of there being any direct consequences in your personal life.

Surfely that’s worth letting a toddler have the nuclear codes, right?

I first noticed this phenomenon a long time ago, when Reader’s Digest added a feature called “That’s An Outrage!”.

This feature’s content was entirely made up of new stories that will piss you off.

And I had to ask myself why on Earth would someone want to read such a thing. In general, people do not actively seek out things that will make them angry. Anger is a response to danger, and inherent in that idea is the idea that danger is bad and to be avoided.

So for people to actively seek out anger is rather counterintuitive, to say the least.

Obviously people were getting something they wanted out of it. But what?

Thne I thought about my theories about where rage addiction comes from and I had my answer. People feel good when they are angry. The adrenaline makes you feel more alive and opens up your senses. you have a feeling of power and (potentially false) clarity, and the world seems crystal clear and easy to understand as a battle between us and the enemy.

This is, by the way, why right wing news outlets are constantly pushing the outrage button. Whether someone is stupid from age, upbringing, or genetics, the need for as many of those world-simplifying moments as possible in order to ease your fears about a world you fear and do not truly understand any more becomes an overwhelming necessity. To give it up would be to risk getting  lost in the complex world of nuanced thought, a world which the person has absolutely no faith in their ability to navigate, and having to admit to themselves that they are adults who have no idea what is really going on. And that thought, of course. is unacceptable.

There is no room for such an admission in modern democratic individualist societies. TO admit this would be to admit one has, in a sense, failed to reach adulthood. Inherent in democracy is the idea that everyone gets a say on what happens and therefore everyone’s opinion is treated equally.

This comes with it the obligation to make sense of the world in order to have some idea of what is going on and how the world works in order to make your opinion matter.

But what if you are simply not up to the task? What if, in any real and objective assessment, you are not capable of handling the complexities of modern life?

You certainly can’t admit it to yourself or anyone else. Nobody is ever going to say “I’m sorry, but I am too stupid to have an opinion on that” when a reporter talks to them on the street. That’s an unthinkable thought. The only people who might do that are people with cognitive handicaps who know they are stupid and deal with it all the time.

Otherwise, there is simply no way to birdge the gap. We liberals need to give up a small but vital piece of our well-intentioned egalitarianism and admit that some people are smarter than others and that one cannot create a world in which everyone is “enlightened” by our standards.

The idea that mean so much to us might well be too complex and uncertain for people who are not part of the naturally occurring intelligentsia. It might well be our obligation to simplify things for people in a way that we personally would find incredibly insulting.

And we have to do it without coming off as patronizing or lecturing or condemning.

And that involves doing what we find hardest : treating people who do not have out gifts as equals. Not just political or philosophical equals either.

We have to treat them like they are just as good as us. And that means getting rid of a whole lot of prejudices and assumptions about “that kind of person”.

Only then will we be able to connect with them and understand them and talk tp them on their level, in their language, addressing their concerns, and actually getting through to them for once.

Otherwise, we will remain villains in their eyes because they can sense liberal disdain for them and people naturally hate those who hate them.

To them, we represent every middle class person who has ever looked at them like they are a lower form of life they can barely tolerate and who acted like the world belonged to them and working class people should be glad we keep them around as cattle.

We nbeed to change that image in their minds.

We need to make friends with them. Go to their events. Soak up their culture. Become part of their communities, without judgment and without disdain.

Only then will they be willing to listen to us.

And I bet we will find out we’re not that different after all, and the divisions are made up bullshit that politicians use to keep us from uniting against our oppressors.

And only then can the healing truly begin.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.