I am beginning to see a reason for hope
Many of you familiar with Stephen King’s post apocalyptic novel “The Stand” probably had the same problem with it that I did. I couldn’t accept that the human race, even a remnant of the human race, could so easily be divided into good guys and bad guys. I wondered, what about people in the middle, people who are neither heroically decent nor intrinsically corrupt? I assumed that was most of us.
The novel was so good that I was happy to suspend my disbelief anyway. Were I to read it again today I would no longer have to. It still feels naive at best and puerile at worst, but I think King was right, I think the human race really is divided between people who are inherently good and people who are inherently evil.
Think of it yourself. Think of all the people who entered Trump world and apparently abandoned their morals and turned off their consciences and became evil. How often have we heard commentators remark that some of these people used to be pleasant and professional? I submit that they were evil jerks all along, we just didn’t know it. Perhaps we would have never found out had it not been for Trump.
Now think of some of the people who found themselves in Trump world and refused to cooperate with his evil plans — as with, most recently, US attorney Danielle Sassoon and others. They refused to go along with Trump’s wicked agenda of open corruption and bribery in the case of New York mayor Eric Adams. Trump, it seems, is the ultimate litmus test.
I used to wonder which camp I would fall into. I used to wonder, for example, if I had been an adult in the 1930s would I have been a Hitler supporter? Given my immediate and visceral hatred of Trump from the very beginning, I suspect not.
It would be a mistake for us to immediately dismiss all of MAGA and abandon hope for them. We have real life examples of Larry Underwood, one of the protagonists in The Stand who, early on, is shouted at by a shabbily-treated young woman, “You ain’t no nice guy!” We have former “not nice guys” such as Michael Cohen, Anthony Scaramucci and Stephanie Grisham, people who were once seduced by the Trump Dark Side and have, to one degree or another, since been redeemed.
I am happy I am on the side of the good guys. You should be too. Most people are, as it turns out, and I’m very happy about that. Without a majority we could never win in our struggle against this monstrous evil that has gripped America. With a majority I am beginning to see a reason for hope.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.