It was October 2015 just weeks before the Presidential election. And I stopped in to pick up a pizza in Pine Island. There was a 20-minute wait. I glanced around the place and saw a couple of stools by a picture window looking out over the onion fields. Not wanting to squeeze sideways into a booth, nor wanting to stand. I walked over and there was an older gentleman sitting there. He was glancing up at the TV which had FoxNewss on. Then would turn with a scowl and resume looking out the window. I went and sat on the far stool hoping my grimaces wouldn’t show each time the news network was lauding candidate Trump. I tend to be easily read expression-wise. A friend I had worked with years ago said “I can read you like a cheap Timexx and everyone else can too.” Most people wear their emotions on their sleeve, my face will tell you my emotions. I will never be called poker face.
The older gentleman I heard say “I wonder what kind of plants those are out in the fields?” I turned and answered that they were pumpkins. He then looked at me and said thanks. He went on to say “I often think out loud and my wife reminds me that it's fine at home” as he shrugged his shoulders. More news about Trump came on about the policies he would enact to save America. Then a scene of one of the Trump rallies came on the TV. As the old man looked out the window shaking his head, he glanced at me and said. “ It looks like you don’t like him either.” Trying to keep a lower voice in a place that obviously idolized him. The MAGA hat on the shelf told me everything I needed to know. I got up and moved to the stool next to him. “ I softly said he‘ll be the downfall of this country. It was like a lightbulb went off and the old man had a huge smile on his face. A smile of knowing someone else was thinking the same thing. He then said to me that he and his wife, who was waiting in the car, always stop here for a few slices of pizza. They were just coming back from her doctor's visit here in NY on their way home to Pa. He told me that his wife had grown up in Germany and was a little girl when the war was going on. And she often talked about her uncles and the way they had talked about Hitler, even after the war some of them still idolized him. The old man leaned in and then said to me almost like he was letting me in on a secret. Lowering his voice and saying. My wife thinks if Americans are stupid enough to vote for him that they deserve everything coming to them by doing this. She said the way her uncles had talked about the Fuhrer when she was little and even up to their deaths. Is exactly the way people are talking about Trump and the way they could treat those who don’t. She said his supporters are no better than and he used a German word I didn't understand. Seeing that he said brown shirts, I nodded as I knew these were the party militia that supported Hitler. I mumbled I hope that he doesn’t get in as the girl behind the counter told the old man his slices were ready and she had put extra plates and napkins in for him. We bid each other goodbye. I was Hoping his wife was wrong.
Trump got in and immediately started to erase the trans community among other bastions of the liberal democrats' social causes.
It is now two years since Trump lost his re-election bid. I had hoped once he was gone, the country might return to some level of normalcy. It seems the hate has gotten worse, the MAGA followers those who have professed undying loyalty to the cause are just modern-day “Sturmabteilung” but now instead of shirts showing their loyalty they wear red hats letting you know who they are. The targeting of the transgender community, targeting Drag Queens. Calls to rain down violence on them.
Last year Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green advocated “Beating” transgender people into the ground for serving as camp counselors.
Mark Burns, a GOP candidate for office in SC, called the fight for LGBTQ rights a treasonous attempt to destabilize the republic and imprison parents of transgender children for Un-American activities.
Now Charlie Kirk, CEO of Turning Point a right-wing organization, has said that transgender people should be “dealt with the way men did in the 1950s and 60s.”
Robert Foster, a former state representative in Mississippi who ran for governor and a MAGA supporter in March of 2022 on his Twitter feed that it gained national attention. Talking about transgender people “I think they need to be lined up in front of a firing squad and sent to an early judgment.”
It seems Frau’s predictions have come true. We have gotten what we deserved. I thought at first that meant electing Trump, but it had a deeper meaning. The hate and division. You are either with them or you need to be taken care of. They use words hinting of violence and the cleansing of American society. The purification of their “Merica”... is the end goal.