I had one of my higher sales this morning - $80 (I am not a high-end deader like the Daddy of All Dealers so $80 is at my high end) - thereby making my five-hour total shlep to the rust belt in August worthwhile. I had bought that book there as well as a few others I have already sold.
I feel pretty relieved about it because the number of sales have dropped by about one-third compared to last year - for many booksellers, apparently. So these higher sales help me catch up money-wise. It's worrisome, though, because I was counting on growing sales over the next eighteen months, not merely maintaining them.
The indexing course is going slowly because of the software (still not totally solved yet and frustrating. But it's going. I'm not depressed about not being back in a school job but I know that this extended sort of time-off can't last forever. I have had trouble focusing the past couple of weeks on anything, I feel like I'm more on brain freeze than not. Uncharacteristically, I have had bad headaches lately. But I keep plugging away. The election has me at in a high dander of anxiety (did I say that right?) partly because of tight polls and, admittedly, partly because of what is described in this. article. I wish there were some kind of pill [legal!] to turn it off but nothing has worked so far and I'm tired of battling over insurance coverage for this and that.
As is not unusual, the sale of that book - an old book on graphic design and business signage - got me thinking again about the utter economic depression I have seen on my two visits to the region where I bought it (See earlier post). Recalling that region, along what my pro-Trump friend said the other day in a FB argument, gave me a smidgin of understanding of why so many people support him. The reality is is that both parties have failed regions like this one terribly. Statistically Trump's claims that the economy is worse are false and his own practices are responsible for job losses. But one can't deny that the Democrats have not figured out how to replace the lost jobs and professions with new ones. They can spout "clean energy" 'til the cows come home but until they provide real recovery, it doesn't mean anything to someone who has to feed his or her family. My pro-Trump friend and I can probably agree on one thing - Obama wasn't great on priorities. The similarity ends there, though, because I always thought Clinton was better and would have preferred her, while to her Clinton is the devil incarnate.
I asked a local Clinton campaigner last week why so many people like Trump. He said they don't - they are just angry at a system that failed them and they want to up-end it and they don't care how they do it. That was a bit of an eye-opener to me. I always saw that kind of thinking in far-left anarchists, not the far-right. And then my friend said that she likes him because he says "what we are all thinking," and that the country was going in the wrong direction. It was kind of the same thing. And it's true. Not all of what Trump supporters are thinking is bad, even if their solution is. It's what many of us are thinking across the board.
Salaries are down for the moderately or highly educated. The jobs for those who are not, are gone. You don't have to go the rust belt to see this or know this. Trump brings racism and simple and untenable solutions when he talks about immigration and Muslims and Latinos, but I can squarely say that I also worry about Islamic terrorism. I have mixed feelings on the undocumented immigrant issue. And you are not allowed to say so in the Democratic narrative. That silence fuels Trump supporters even more.
I worked for almost ten years in a school of mainly children of undocumented Latino immigrants. Naturally, most of me loved them and did everything possible to give them an education that would raise their status as Americans. But part of me was resentful that their undocumented parents got benefits, via their American-born children, that my daughter and I don't even as my salary was being cut (by a GOP governor albeit). I remember my kids - that is, my students - getting free braces when, even with insurance, I had to shell out $7,000 for my own child. And then there are my friends in technology who have seen their salaries drop while their companies bring in cheaper engineers and programmers on H-1 visas.
And then, as a Jew and the daughter of an Israeli, I fear - and name - terrorism that like or not is drawn from particular strains of Islam. I'm just as troubled by the open anti-Semitism and violence that comes from the huge Muslim populations in France and Belgium as I am by the rise of fascism in Orban's Hungary. My friends in Budapest were bringing food and blankets to refugees in Keleti Station last year. By nature I would have joined them. And yet, I myself would not want to see thousands and thousands those young men of fighting age settling in my area. The riots against Jews in France and the many assault reports of women bears that out. It's not a matter of banning refugees - absurd as well as un-American. The U.S. screens refugees in a way that Western Europe does not. The idea of banning a group based on ethnicity or religion is indefensible.
My Judaism is a big slice of my identity pie, but I live, I choose to live, in a world -- socially and professionally - with Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and atheists. Democrats and Republicans and in between. Educated and not educated. American and not American. This is my existence, my daughter's existence. And it is different from the much more insular existence of, say, my Hasidic cousins, some of whom likely support Trump. But a lot of my liberal friends and the President don't acknowledge the very real fears of Islamic terrorism, any more than the right acknowledges Trump's affinity for neo-Nazis and for ideas that resemble them. Neither party has addressed these issues sensibly - so Trump was able to take people's worst inclinations on a very real issue and fill a vacuum. I get that because sometimes I feel it.
No, as I have said many times, I don't make excuses for people supporting the racism, sexism, autocratic statements, dishonesty, economics proven wrong, and general boorishness that come from him. We're adults here - we make our choices. And I very much feel that we have fallen into the very mental state we fought against in the 1930s and taken on a view of women that is frighteningly retrograde. But on thing is the same: That rust-belt feeling among all of us. Selling an eighty-dollar book once in a blue moon is not enough.
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