Christie Blatchford: Enough with the pearl-clutching over Trump’s win. Kids will get over it and so should you
An American Democratic Party supporter cries after Donald Trump wins the state of Florida at the Democrats Abroad election night party at Marylebone Sports Bar and Grill on November 8, in London, England.
Like Hillary Clinton, I am a nasty woman.
And though I’ve never been so invested in a political candidate or party that a loss would deeply affect me, I certainly have felt that way about hockey teams.
I once carved a profanity — about the Swedes, for God’s sake, and who doesn’t like Swedes? — in the end boards of an Olympic rink after Team Sweden beat Team Canada, in a shootout for God’s sake, for the gold medal.
I offer this only so you may understand that I know what it is be a sore loser, to give away a piece of your heart to something bigger than yourself.
I get that Clinton supporters, and maybe anyone with half a brain, would be crushed and upset that Donald Trump is about to become the 45th U.S. president.
Were I one of the aforementioned two groups, no doubt I’d feel a bit of the same, though I’d lean more to anger. I understand anger (if not quite as well as I did when I was younger, when my temper was a white-hot thing with a mind of its own). Rage in my view is a perfectly normal response to a kick in the teeth.
What I decidedly do not get is the weeping, gnashing of teeth and pearl-clutching (thanks to John Moore of Newstalk 1010 for the latter) that is going on in the wake of the U.S. election.
The morning after, the airwaves were full of earnest news anchors interviewing psychologists and the like on the best way to break the terrible news to the frightened children of America and Canada.
This, I figured, was simply more evidence of what CBS News writer Will Rahn this week described as the “unbearable smugness” of the press, wherein most journalists, cut from the same #WithHer cloth and with a “shamefully limited understanding of the country,” treated Trump supporters as backward yobs and believe that it is our continuing duty not to fix ourselves, but to reeducate them about the dangerous thing they wrought with their votes.
Part of that, of course, is accepting as gospel the tearful assertions from parents that their kids were shattered by the Trump victory.
Still, on another level, fair enough.
I am not a parent, and perhaps my not inconsiderable observation of other people’s youngsters has mistakenly led me to see them as akin to rubber balls, in that they are resilient little devils who can take pretty much whatever life throws at them so long as they have at least one reasonably sane adult in their lives.
But over the next post-election days the theme endured and spread such that Friday, on the front page of the arts section of another national Canadian newspaper, over a big picture of Trump, there was a headline which read, “Mommy, why does he look so happy? And why do you look so sad?”
The story told the woeful tale of a privileged white woman (dutifully, she self-identified) and her husband who on the morning after, determined they had best raise the difficult subject before their son went off to school for the day.
The poor wee devil (too young to declare his own privilege, his mommy did it for him by noting that he was at the time “on the sofa, naked and wrapped in a sheepskin,” as the offspring of a certain type of privileged whites regularly are) was then subjected to an angsty discussion while, en famille, they watched Trump’s victory speech.
Daddy kicked it all off by saying, “A bad and crazy man has been elected the leader of the free world,” whereupon the wee boy asked, “If he’s a bad man, why is he saying nice things?” and Mommy replied, “Because he’s a very happy bad man.”
The little bugger is
four years old. Are you freaking kidding me? How better to raise a delicate cabbage than worry a toddler with such horse manure?
It wasn’t confined to the households of the self-consciously precious, either.
On the page below that piece was the story of an Ottawa woman who on election night had prepared for a #WithHer victory party and found herself with blue-frosted cupcakes sprinkled with glass candy, guests in tears, and someone who “literally broke out in hives” at the news.
(Perhaps the woman was using “literally” the way people do now, meaning the precise opposite. But I sense she was not.)
On campuses across the States, there were “cry-ins” (Cornell University), tests and lectures cancelled or made optional out of deference to the feelings of the traumatized (University of Michigan, Columbia University, Yale University) and safe spaces, some “with staff on hand to listen and provide support” to the desolate (University of Wisconsin at Madison) and some with Play-Doh and colouring books on offer (University of Michigan).
Good grief.
The Mommy-why-do-you-look-so-sad piece and its companion ran in the Canadian paper on Remembrance Day.
Is it churlish to point out that in those days, 18-year-olds were fighting a war and dying in unspeakable numbers in Europe, not crying on the shoulders of paid soothers about an election result?
All of which is to say, Donald Trump isn’t the scary one.
Christie Blatchford: Enough with the pearl-clutching over Trump’s win. Kids will get over it and so should you | National Post
