Sam Smith – When a con artist as despicable as Donald Trump attracts so much support, it is time to look at what has happened to our collective society to permit this. Quite independent of Trump, I’ve been thinking about this for sometime. When I moved full time from my hometown of Washington DC to my longtime summer vacation retreat – a small town in Maine – I soon realized how different these two places were and, eventually, how symbolic it was of what was happening to our nation.
Where I live now I have yet to meet a con man or an institution whose purpose is to defraud me. In fact, when I go out I not only find what I’m looking for, but real decency and niceness from those providing me with it, whether it be a store, a bank, a restaurant or a doctor. Increasingly, the society I find reading or watching the national news is dramatically different than the one I experience in my personal life.
I began to track the differences and was struck by how a normal day in my town is driven by values and behaviors quietly involving standards I was taught when I was young but experience far less dealing with matters and institutions these days.
For example, I went to a high school run by Quakers, aka the Society of Friends, and was taught not how to beat everyone in my class but to share with them the exciting experience of learning all sorts of new things. Working on a farm in the summer I learned how to do things right but was never advised to just talk my way out of something that had gone wrong. And serving on a Coast Guard vessel, no one ever suggested that I could verbally manipulate a storm.
Such experiences were so different from what I experienced covering Washington as a journalist. Reality turned into how you talked about it. Power replaced purpose. And trust was increasingly hard to come by.
Now it is so much worse. The standards of large corporations and other mega-institutions, the decline of civil and civic education, the value placed on individual rather than community achievement, and the decline of religion, cooperation and mutual assistance have been increasingly replaced by media-driven images of individuals like Donald Trump, huge businesses, and truth trivialized by advertising and public relations.
It is not just Donald Trump that’s the problem. He’s just a major beneficiary of how things have changed. We have to find ways to practice again the habits of traditional human beings, things like cooperation, kindness, fairness and democracy. And for me, moving to a small Maine town, has made it much easier.
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