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As people prepare for Thanksgiving dinners with company I don’t necessarily think they ought to be keeping, it is time for another little essay. This one has actually been coming since Dec 7, 2015, when my son posted a NY Times article with the headline “Donald Trump calls for barring Muslims from Entering U.S.,” to which I commented “Colin, a single lunatic is one thing; that a really huge chunk of the country agrees with his views is what is *truly* shocking.”

Ever since then, when people rail at and decry the evil that spews from this would-be dictator, I have tried to remind them of the elephant in the room: the millions upon millions of our fellow Americans whose values and belief systems he reflects like a mirror. (And don’t kid yourself: that is exactly what he is doing. It is his one master skill, in fact, as a sociopath without an intrinsic belief system of his own.) And I’m not talking about those wealthy, educated Republicans who adopt situational prejudices as the need arises in order to justify actions that take economic advantage of vulnerable groups of people, and then discard those biases just as quickly when they no longer provide economic benefit. Such people know exactly what they’re doing; they are utterly amoral, but have drunk no kool-aid, they run this show for and to their own benefit. They are, in the lyrics of a classic show about oppression and revolution, the Masters of the House.

I am referring to the much larger group of folks who, time and again, vote against their own economic interests; who have so easily and repeatedly been fooled, in the most perpetual shell game ever, into blaming their fellow struggling or barely-comfortable neighbors for the injustices that those far above them on the economic ladder inflict upon everyone else.

For the past three years, I’ve been listening to liberals try to explain, understand (and so, they hope, modify) this bizarre pattern of behavior witnessed among conservative friends, colleagues and loved ones. (I even attended meetings on “communicating with the other side” at my UU fellowship — not because I have an interest in doing so, but because I wanted to see what pretzel knots of rationalization my follow parishoners were willing to tie themselves in, to ease their grief and despair when confronted with the harsh reality of their GOP family members’ revolting immorality.) Time and again, what people keep distilling the argument down to is that the Trump GOP is a cult, and their friends and families are innocent, brainwashed victims.

One can see how this explanation is appealing: “though *some* Trumpers are truly evil, *mine* have just been sucked in; though *some* are unredeemable, *mine* are fundamentally good and can change back, if I wait patiently for them.” After all, isn’t that the message of so much liberal theology, liberal therapy, liberal rehabilitation: redemption is always around the corner; don’t ever throw anyone away?

Sadly, however, when it comes to how people put this philosophy into practice, it’s also shockingly lazy. What I’ve seen for the past three-plus years is that, among almost everyone I know, the belief that “my conservative friends and family have been brainwashed” has led to the conclusion “so I don’t really *need* to do much more in terms of engagement except wait quietly for them to come to their senses” —  rather than tackling the upsetting and seemingly insurmountable problem of changing who these pretty nasty people actually ARE (regardless of whom you think they were once, could be again, should be, want to be, etc., etc.).

*That’s* an easy approach. Also, terrible.

First of all, given that self-reflection is anathema to Americans, I’m not sure what magic you think is going to prompt this epiphany among your Trumpie pals, all on its own and certainly without any effort or input from you. In fact, I’m sorry to tell you, but you are waiting for goddamn Godot. I hope you brought a pillow; you’re going to be sitting on that rock for quite a while.

Second, as Maya Angelou said, “when people show you who they are, believe them.”

And so, since before the election, I’ve been repeating like a broken record that we all need to deal directly with the character of our country, which is now in a state of disrepair so shocking that the future of our nation itself is in terrible peril. Yet everyone continues to make everything about Trump. I get it: every day, he does more awful things, and now, more and more facts are revealed daily about actual, impeachable offenses that, if they are allowed to remain unchecked, will surely change the ethical nature of our government forever.

But for those of us who make up the masses, to be satisfied to leave the quarrel — and that is not really the term; it is truly a civil war for the soul of our country — on that level, to leave it all only on the Hill and in the voting booth, is a terrible mistake and a personal abdication of our civic and moral duty. We cannot do this and just hope that everyone we know “straightens out,” once Trump is gone, because, if we do, the box of evils that he and his cronies crop dusted all over us will just sit there waiting for the next demagogue to get in the pilot’s seat — and there *will* be a next time, because hijacking that plane has now been shown to be both possible and pretty lucrative. And next time we will start that much closer to the edge, too, with all the ground we’ve lost, in terms of common values, decencies and societal expectations.

So what am I actually saying?

Well, first, bad UU though it makes me, I do not believe that Anne Frank, in her adolescent niavete and profound fear for her own safety, was right; I don’t think most people are good at heart. I think most people will be good if it affords them something they want and if it’s easy, but if it’s hard and it hurts, a whole lot of people will behave quite badly, without a second thought, and super quick. (Remember Milgram? The only reason the post-WWII National Character studies didn’t demonstrate different national characters is because they demonstrated instead that the whole species is pretty damn rough, writ large.)

Furthermore, Trumpers aren’t ever going to demonstrate clarity about their own foulness, on their own. As a kid, this quote from Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying about post-war Germans really stayed with me: “It was their hypocracy I abhorred. At least if they’d come out openly and said: ‘We loved Hitler,’ one might have weighed their humanity with their honesty and perhaps forgiven them. In the three years I lived I’m Germany I only met one man who admitted that.”

So, this is what the situation is: We live in the country of Trump, but it is also the country **created by and in the image of your GOP voting friends and family.** These people have built our whole nation on a zero sum game — in our schools, in our workplaces, in our housing, everywhere. They are ok (in fact, happy) with this, because they think they can win this game, and they’d rather risk playing than see *everyone* get ahead, because their version of the American way is *not* Keeping Up with the Joneses, it is doing *better* than them — trying to get as much as possible while slapping whatever the Joneses (or Johnsons and Rodriguezes) have right out of their hands. That last bit is fundamental. Don’t think it doesn’t apply to your GOP family members. It is integral to their character.

Granted, the GOP builds their brand specifically by appealing to that (large) segment of the population that has an amygdala oversensitive to fear stimuli. (Yes, there have been ever so many fMRI studies of liberal and conservative brains, and content analysis studies of political messaging.) But this does not mean that such fear-triggered people could not use reason to control their emotional responses *if they wanted to.* The fact is: they *don’t* want to. The bottom line is that smashing something that scares you provides way more of a buzz than just telling yourself not to be scared; it’s just more emotionally rewarding, whether we’re talking about stomping on a spider, or waiving tiki torches, or the people in my town trying to block Hispanics from using the town park. (Yup, happened.) People do things that are rewarding, and fear can be used that way, and Hitler knew it, and so does Trump, but so do all those people voting to build walls. It feels *good.* That’s. Why. They. Do. It.

So, bottom line: people SEEK OUT Fox news and the like because it ***reinforces what they want (and have always wanted) to hear.***  These folks didn’t start from a neutral point, let alone a compassionate, liberal world view, or they would never have been susceptible — please stop kidding yourself. Yes, Fox radicalizes them just as a terrorist organization radicalizes its members, but (sorry, folks) your conservative kinsmen were already adherents of that religion. Otherwise they wouldn’t have started watching, or kept watching, in the first place — they, just like we, seek out information that supports their own *inherent* belief systems, and they are constitutionally inclined to avoid information and sources which suggest anything that goes against what they already believe to be true. If your “brainwashed” relatives hadn’t agreed with this crap to begin with, either upfront or deep down, hearing it would have made them as uncomfortable as it makes us, and they would have run away.

Sigh. Many years ago, my father told me a shaggy dog story that is my favorite joke of all time, because I’ve discovered it applies to every single situation in the world, or at least, every screw up I’ve ever encountered. It goes like this: A man happens upon a guy on his knees under a street light. “What are you doing?” asks the man. “Looking for my contact lens,” comes the reply. “Ok, I’ll help you,” says the man, and goes down on his knees, too. Then another person happens by, and the exchange is repeated. Then another, and so on — soon, there are a great many people crawling around under the street light, looking in frustration for the lens. Finally, someone shouts “argh! Where did you drop it, exactly?!” The original guy replies “over there,” pointing away down a dark alley. “Then why are we looking here?” everyone asks, bewildered. “Because the light’s better.” And the moral of THAT story is: look for the God damned contact lens where it actually is, not where there is great light but you will never find it.

So PLEASE, already, let’s start dealing with — and I really mean FIGHTING, with some BALLS, please — this difficult problem where it actually is. These folks aren’t brainwashed, this is who they are; they aren’t magically going to change by themselves, and a change in administration isn’t going to put everything right. (Also: if you have been telling yourself that your infected people aren’t truly like that themselves, they just voted that way, like, cuz, boo Hillary, or boo taxes — please stop. Do you hear yourself? If you voted for it, that is you. If you vote to make things happen, you are ok with those things happening.)

On Oct 25, Twitter acct WTFGOP (https://t.co/wyHeHlp0v7) tweeted “Raise your hand if you don’t give a fuck about how white evangelical protestants don’t like that he’s getting impeached 🙋🏻‍♀️” and thousands hit “like,” but we actually need to give a fuck. Screw that one single lunatic — we need to start *dealing* with the millions of bigoted nutjobs that are about to sit down to table with us (or wherever and whenever we are encountering them — nobody should be getting a pass, not even your inlaws, hey, especially your inlaws) because *they* are actually the people infected with this disease, and they are coughing all over everything (if by no other means, with their profoundly damaging votes on everything from local referendums to defund libraries to keeping snakes like McConnell and Graham in power to destroy us). This is not politics, it’s a complete lack of morality, and it’s *not ok.*

And please stop waiting to see how bad your conservative pals are going to get. That’s just prurient voyeurism at best, and a really pathetic excuse to keep acting like a mute chicken, at worst. Those folks don’t need to have been tricked into defending Nixon’s crimes on a late night talk show man-on-the-street segment (God, what idiots), or to openly admit to you (as if they would) that they like the idea of kids in cages to have crossed the line and need a good talking to. They VOTED for the latter, and they are defending crimes that differ from the former’s primarily in that, in the current case, the situation is made MORE egregious by the involvement of at least one foreign government. The answer to “how low will they go” is **clearly** “lower than is even remotely acceptable,” and we passed *that* point quite awhile ago. We shouldn’t be expressing curiosity about what the nadir will be, we should be out there decrying who these people are and what they’re doing, promoting, supporting and/or excusing NOW. There is no excuse.

Your friends aren’t going to change on their own, because they like who they are. Like other would-be despots before him, Trump told the deplorable masses (Hillary was right about that — she just vastly underestimated their prevalence; their sheer pervasiveness) exactly what they want to hear: that, finally they are off the hook for all their basest instincts, and what’s more, that they were right all along, nay they were *smart,* they were *winners* to be bigots; to be fearful of anything beyond their immediate property line; to never watch the news; read a book or be able to process scientific developments; to have prurient interests and vulgar tastes. They’ve been told that their characters, which have so long been in question, are not only fine — that they can finally stop trying to be more, pretending, and secretly feeling inadequate — but that they are actually the cool kids. Give that up on their own? Ha. They are going to defend that position with their lives.

So what should you do? It’s super simple. Tell them. Tell them they are being immoral and disgusting. That they support and excuse criminal behavior against this country and crimes against humanity. Tell them they are unAmerican, and they are personally throwing away the integrity of the country. If they are Christians, tell them they are not, because they are not. Tell them you see them, and that **this is not ok with you.** Tell them you are through ignoring their revolting values and behavior, because you will not be complicit with this situation as they are. Do not mince words. Stop worrying about offending someone. *They* are being offensive — unbelievably, incredibly offensive — and they are being told by the GOP that this is ok. Don’t let them get that message from YOU, too,  because you are too afraid or lazy to speak up. Stop being complicit. Open your damn mouth. Every. Single. Time. We are at war — I’ve been saying that from the beginning, too. Have you still not noticed?

You wanted to resist. What did you think that meant, really? Only from noon to three on a few Saturdays per year, and only among strangers? The war is coming  to a Thanksgiving table near you, this very Thursday. Time to speak up for truth, honor, justice and the American way, sweethearts. Stop making RBG go it alone.