APRIL 24, 2019 – My wife recently read me a FB political meme that went something like this:
I get home from vacation and find my basement full of rabid raccoons. I call the city, I call several exterminators, but no one can or even wants to try to clean my basement of these awful vermin. I learn of a guy who’s not afraid of getting his hands dirty. He drives over immediately. He’s big and stinky, his breath is foul, he talks loud and profanely, and when he bends over to pull his tools out, the sun shines on a good foot’s worth of butt crack. I really don’t care about any of that, because in the end, he’s the only person who’s willing to get rid of all those rabid raccoons.
“Yeah, but(t) . . .” I say, “for starters, exactly what (or who) are the rabid raccoons?” Immigrants? Asylum seekers? Democrats? People of color? French people? People from New York City? The FBI? Kellyanne Conway’s husband? Uh . . . Michael Cohen?
But perhaps the “rabid raccoons” are not really any of the above. Maybe the hydrophobic vermin are simply a convenient metaphor for a suite of economic forces that have wrecked or threatened the long-time livelihoods of millions of Americans; or dark fears about a wave of demographic change that will soon transform the long-time majority into a long-lasting minority; or maybe all those raccoons in the basement represent broad frustration with a socio-political-economic system that has become unfathomable at best and contemptuously dismissive at worst.
The lesson here, I think, is twofold. First, we shouldn’t equate (a) the guy with the big butt crack; with (b) the figurative homeowner who hired him. Sure, out there are plenty of people whose affinity for the butt-crack guy is, well, reflective, but a good many people who hired him are good people. Accordingly, they deserve to be heard, their concerns taken into account, so that forces and fears perceived as rabid raccoons can be identified and harnessed.
If “their guy” is not the right guy for the job, the horrified homeowner needs to know why. Simply calling the homeowner unreasonably “scared” or “wrong” or worse won’t change the score. As for the “butt crack guy” himself, what better way to be done with him than to show him the door?
But showing him the door won’t eradicate the rabid raccoons—the fears and frustrations. To put the nation back on track, the Dems need better vision for 2020; the vision to see that however problematic the guy with the butt crack might be, he isn’t the ultimate problem. He’s the symptom of fears and forces that must be acknowledged, understood and addressed—with rationality, not rabid rage.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
