Sharon Morgan please forgive me for taking this long to reply to you. I agree with you that’s extremes on both sides. But the woman who shared this post is not an extremist. She is a hard-working, intelligence, Creative, and good hearted person who I have known since my youth.
I have been frantic to understand why adamant Trumper‘s feel the way they do. Sadly, the political climate has been so heated that unlike in the old days when I could ask ‘why’ and get a reasonable answer, these days I can’t. Everybody’s afraid to talk to each other about it bEcause of the arguments and lost friends with the subject comes up. I have a number of friends who are very conservative and really like trump. We have agreed not to discuss the subject because what binds us together is much more important than politics.
When Cindy shared this post, A number of emotions washed over me. I suddenly felt like I understood where the other people are coming from. If you read it carefully, you will note that there was nothing actually accusing liberals of anything. It’s all about how she feels in this terrible time. How she is misunderstood. How she is not valued. How the core patriotic values of our collective past are now subject to ridicule and scorn. How hard she works and yet she is considered nothing.
As I read it, I saw it! Cindy Berg is not wrong!
Forgive me as I divert now because you have to understand some of my past To understand why I feel like this is a very valid post and a watershed moment for me.
You are aware that I spent quite a while under the tutelage of Richard Simmons. I was a tremendous success story there As I lost hundreds of pounds. I was his poster child for quite a while, being held up as an example for others to emulate. Over the years, I gained quite a bit of skill presenting myself to the media as well. I was used in TV, videos, and print. Until his next success story came along - which was years and years after me, I was the go-to girl. Which is why I believe I was kept around that long. I was not a standard follower.
Richard Simmons was a cult leader. It was not a horrible cult and in fact, he did a lot of people a lot of good. The cult did not demand money or religion or any of the normal trappings. It only required unwavering loyalty and love and hopefully weight loss as well. I knew it to be a cult because everyone around him had only one purpose. To get closer to him. To be in his inner circle. To serve the man.
I am not one to fall into a cult mentality. I am too afraid I’ll be controlled by someone who will be harshly judge mental of me. However, I did benefit from being in a situation where I was not the odd one out for my extreme weight. Richard was immediately attracted to me when I first walked through his doors not only because of my weight but also because I was different than his average student. I worked on my art while waiting for class to begin. I answered him honestly instead of giving him what he expected to hear, and many of my answers were funny as well as unexpected. I refused to take part in anything I was uncomfortable with, even though he begged me to join. Like I said, not his average student. And because of this, he paid me special attention for all of our relationship. And I thrived under his guidance.
Many people came to class. Both from Los Angeles but also across the country. Richard clearly loved the attention. But there were people he loved and then there were people who he had no respect for and was extremely cruel to. Yet they kept coming back.
I could not understand it. Especially later when I was his success story, I just didn’t get why anyone would keep going someplace where they were clearly not wanted. I even offered to run interference for these poor souls with Richard and try to make him stop it. Every single one of them refused me. I could not understand it. Not at all.
Then, one day, I watched “The Breakfast Club” on tv for the umpteenth time. I find that movie very compelling. And as the kids were discussing the different ways they were abused, the Allie Sheedy character summed what was going on at Richard Simmons in one sentence. “They ignore me.”
OMG! That was it! The people who kept coming back over and over despite horrifying treatment... they were mostly ignored in their real lives and Richard paid them attention! Any kind of attention, even negative, is better than no attention at all! And now I come back to Most of the Trumpers... especially the ones I like.
When I read the shared note, I realized they feel the same way as the people at Richards. The same way as the Ally Sheedy character. They work hard, they keep their noses clean, they love G’d and their country, they do good things, and they are ignored by what they call ‘Liberal Hollywood Elite’! And they are right!
I have often said that Trump did me a favor because he brought to my attention a whole group of people who were completely off of my radar. Working people. People who call themselves average, not that there is anything average about them. But my career path took me to places where I almost never interacted with that kind of folk, and I forgot them! As I think most of the “Liberal Hollywood Elite” did. They worked hard and got by, so we were not drawn by their sad stories as we are by other groups. We forgot them and how important they are to this country!
Donald Trump, IMHO, is a lot of things horrible. He is unhinged. But he is not stupid and he does have star quality. With people of our - ahem - age group, we can remember way back to the 80’s when he was called “The Donald.” Donald Trump in 2016 talked to these people who had been ignored for what seemed forever. It didn’t matter what he said. It didn’t matter if it was all lies or he never intended to do anything good for them. It didn’t matter if he used them and abused them and left them worse off than they were before. He talked to them.
He paid them attention and never stopped. And just like what I saw with Richard Simmons, they loved him for it. Any attention is better than no attention.
Trump could have won 2020 and easily. He and Biden were not that far apart. His tragic mistake -for him - was the way he handled the pandemic. From a liberal point of view, the growing numbers of the ill was a good thing. As he continued to press home the point that Coronavirus was not a big deal and we were rounding the corner, a lot of people were suddenly knowing people who got it and were critically ill or dying. I think those people ended up voting for Biden because he was presenting a plan to get past it where Trump was giving us nothing. If not for Coronavirus, I believe Trump would still be king. Because he paid attention to people who were ignored.
All people are not the same. I wholly agree with you on that. And the people who honestly believe the election was stolen have a bigger problem than Joe-American and as Trump has become more unhinged as he realized he was not going to be able to bully his way back into office, those were the people he was talking to. Other people who were unhinged. I have no respect for them for who they are and especially what they did last week. But most conservatives and even Trumpers did not participate in that and never would. They are good people off of our radar. Formerly my radar.
I wonder if you might be surprised that Cindy, her mother Fay, and a whole group of their friends, conservative all, are the reason I am liberal? It’s the truth. In my childhood and teens, me and my sisters lived through some of the most depraved forms of abuse that you could never even imagine. My mother was completely insane, paranoid, and violent. My father was overtly suicidal and was as afraid of our mother as we were. Each of the sisters were isolated and pitted against each other, sadly a state of affairs that lingers to this day. We each tried to find ways out of the home or we would die there.
Cindy’s mother, Fay, invited me (with my horse) to move into her barn. I was thrilled. Fay, who hauled horses for a living, started letting me ride with her on her jobs. I was completely traumatized by my upbringing and was completely closed in on myself, not brave enough to trust anybody or anything. It was a true kindness what she did.
Over time, Cindy became involved with me too. She started helping me with my horse. Both Fay and Cindy had me start riding their horse, Shammy, at the barn and at horse shows as my horse was just too old to do what I was asking of her. And as I started to win a little and get just a little bit of self esteem, Cindy invited me inside to hang with the cool kids. I was a fish out of water... it was decades later before I became confident enough in myself to even start living a normal life, but had it not been for the kindness of these people, to me the literal definition of doing what liberals want to be, I am quite certain I never would have survived. Not just my youth but even to or past middle age.
But they did it because that is who they are. With no fanfare, no showing off, no bringing attention to themselves. And that is exactly the Republican prototype that I believe is the majority of the conservative movement.
We, the liberals, ignored them. But even conservative politicians did so too. They would travel through conservative states making all sorts of meaningless promises and as soon as they were elected, would completely forget them.
Shame on all of us. Shame especially on me! I lost contact with Cindy and Fay decades ago because of something I am not going to discuss. I always still loved them and hoped to someday reconnect. We did in recent years, and they have demonstrated that they still care too. But we have only seen each other in person once. I think it’s because of our respective politics and fear of what a disagreement might mean. I hope it’s only that. Because I think I finally get what conservatives and Trump people are seeing and feeling, thanks to Cindy, and I want to be friends with them. Real friends.
I am scared of what comes next. I have never been a great fan of Pelosi although I thought she was the perfect foil for Trump. I’m not sure what I think about the impeachment. I want him forbidden to run for office again. But I’m not sure this is the right methodology to go about it.
I’m really afraid of what the Democrats are going to do now. Are they going to be inclusive as Biden promised. Sadly, I fear not. I have a feeling that they are now going to lord their slight lead in congress over the Republicans and demand their pound of flesh. They are going to make this terrible separation in the country even worse.
I am not Republican. Especially for what it stands for these days. But I am only loosely affiliated with the Democratic cause because Democrats, IMHO, are mostly mouth service and don’t follow up on their purported philosophy.
In a perfect world, the horrors of the last four years will start to abate with the new administration. But I’m so scared for for the future that I have actually told Eric that he was right. When Trump was elected President, we maybe should have left the country.
At the time, I did not believe things could be as awful as they are. I also didn’t approve of his choice of country to leave for. Norway. Too cold. But also because when I asked him, he admitted to me that the reason he wanted to go there was because we were watching Vikings and really enjoying it. 🙂
Sharon, you are the only person who actually questioned me about this post. Somehow, I knew that if anybody, it would be you and I respect and love you more for it. I hope my essay makes sense. It’s what’s happening right now as I see it through opened eyes. I welcome further thoughts from you, from Cindy, and from anybody who would like enlightenment and can keep it civil. Our commonalities bind us, but it’s our differences that make life interesting and keep us growing.
Keeping what I have just said in mind, I would invite you to read the post again. See if you don’t see it a little differently. Not so much as a hostile declaration, but a statement of agony.
