Opened Mouths Equal Closed Ears
Like many of my friends I woke up this morning in the surreal state of having no understanding of what happened the night before.
I woke up with the feeling of a wail sitting at the back of your throat coupled with the fear that if you tried to speak all that would come out would be sobs.
This feeling is not unknown to me. I felt it in high school when I told my best friend I no longer wanted to be friends. I felt it on September 11, and I felt it last year when my dog Billie died.
It the empty feeling that only failure brings when it’s accompanied by guilt.
What could I have done? What did we do? Did the country just accept hate as a standard? Why?
As a kid, my high school teacher (the first of many) would say to me “Opened Mouths Equal Closed Ears.” Bullshit, I would respond. I can hear you just fine.
But, I couldn’t.
We couldn’t.
We spent all of our time talking. We wrote billions of tweets and Facebook posts; we wrote blog posts and articles; we did everything but listen.
And because of that, we missed it. We missed the message that was being screamed at us by so much of America.
“We are willing to put someone in power that is so different from the establishment, because the establishment has stopped caring about us.”
“We are willing to blow it all up, because you city folk are just shouting at us and telling us what is right. Perhaps that works in New York City, but here, on this Wisconsin dairy farm, it doesn’t.”
“I know that all the research is showing that everyone wants a black president, and gay marriage, amnesty for immigrants and concussion protocols, but it’s too much change too fast. We want the America that likes to drink beer, shoot guns and watch football. We want the America we remember where everyone looked like us, and we weren’t losing jobs to robot trucks and all those other things you non-whites seem to love.”
White people voted for trump.
70% of voters were white.
58% of those voted for trump. (31% for Clinton)
63% of white men; 53% of white women. (31% & 43% for Clinton)
48% of young (18–29) whites. (43% for Clinton)
49% of college educated whites. (45% for Clinton)
67% of non-college educated whites.
The only white demographic that trump didn’t win? College-educated white women.
We didn’t listen. We kept stamping our feet and raising our voices about his racism and xenophobia and sexual predator history and treatment of women and horrible business practices and everything about the man…and in that din of righteousness, we forgot to ask why.
The words were there. We missed them with our open mouths. And now with the protests we have shown that we haven’t learned our lesson. We continue to shout. We continue to talk at everyone around us. We continue to live in an echo chamber that has remove the air from progress.
How do we move forward? The best way to remove that wail lodged in the back of our collective throats? Listen. Learn. Act. Change. Prevail.