Hyper-partisan snow removal
When an act of kindness for a neighbor is "rewarded" with a hate-filled rant against him, is it any wonder when that hostility is reciprocated?
A few years ago, as I walked outside to shovel my driveway, I was startled by a noise. One of neighbors was zipping down the sidewalk on a riding lawnmower with a snow plow attached. Within a few minutes, he had the sidewalks cleared for the entire block. I was very grateful for this, as I am sure the rest of the block was. What I did not do is wonder if it was appropriate to thank him if he disagreed with me about politics. To this day, I do not know his politics, nor do I care. This is because I am not insane.
That cannot be said of a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, who responded to her neighbors plowing her driveway without being asked, for free, by penning a hateful screed comparing them to Hezbollah and Nazi sympathizers. I cannot imagine that the neighbors expected that their good deed would make them a target of hate speech. They probably never imagined that someone they helped would be that bitter against them afterward, because they (along with 74 million other Americans) voted for Donald Trump.
Here are some quotes from the screed:
How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?
Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon, also gives things away for free.
My neighbors supported a man who showed near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans.
We have heard for five years about how we should not "normalize" President Trump. We should also not normalize this kind of hatred, because this is not how normal people act. Normal people do not pen hateful screeds in national newspapers because their neighbors do something nice for them with no expectation of a reward. This is not "Trump Derangement Syndrome." This person is so obsessed with politics and so totally convinced of her own "righteousness" that had Trump never jumped into politics, she would still find a way to hate her neighbors. The issue is not that they supported Trump, because she would be saying the same thing about Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush or Rick Santorum or Chris Christie or Marco Rubio.
What this woman does not realize is that she is one of the big reasons that 74 million Americans voted for Donald Trump last year. They see a dominant culture that hates them, hates their values, and treats them with contempt. They see how an act of kindness for a neighbor is "rewarded" with a hate-filled rant against them. They know that the radical Left has a cultural agenda that demands total submission and never-ending apologies for the "heresy" of holding conservative views on politics. We know that the radical Left is coming for us, and many of us saw Trump as someone who was standing in the way.