It's Time

Waiting to go into the movies a few nights ago I overheard a man coming out of the previous showing talking the picture over with the ticket taker. The man said he thought the picture was beautiful to look at and very well done but, he said, he just wasn’t in the mood for it. How can you be in the mood for something this serious, he asked, when Trump was threatening to kill an entire civilization? He went on, the places that Trump and Netanyahu’s bombs were destroying were places he had long dreamed of visiting and with that no longer possible, how could he enjoy the movie? And I wanted to throw up.

It wasn’t as bad as, earlier in the day, coming across footage of a CNBC host asking a guest how investors live with the uncertainty that comes from a sitting president announcing that an entire civilization would die that night—a question so grotesque you can imagine it coming from the mind of the deadliest satirist. But what the man at the movies shared with that host was, in the face of a promised war crime, a commitment to the selfishness that got us into this farrago in this first place.

Stupidity and racism and xenophobia all played their part in Trump’s reelection. But at the bottom of every vote for Trump—and in that category I include every gutless wonder on the left who couldn’t pull the lever for Kamala—was selfishness. The horrors that were waiting for immigrants or Americans of color or LGBT Americans under a Trump presidency, atrocities that anyone with a modicum of sense knew were just down the road, didn’t matter to people more concerned with the price of eggs, or cretinous enough to believe that Trump, a man whose first act as President in 2017 was to issue a ban on Muslims entering the country, would somehow be better for Gaza than Kamala.