DenisHorgan.com

What’s a poor bigot to do?

There are people who simply despise blacks. And women. And old people. They will not take seriously women or blacks or mature neighbors who have accomplished so very much more than even their poisoned hearts will acknowledge. It takes so many forms, happily most not so blatant as in recent times. Very recent times.

It continues and we all know it does. We all know people, relatives, neighbors, friends who will not vote for a black person or a woman. There are those who patronize and demean the elderly as doddering old fools, simply big children. We see it every day still.

As a Catholic, unwanted and banished by the bishops because I imagine to vote for Democrats, I wonder what on earth distinguishes Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton that would lead to Catholics rejecting him by amazing percentages. They stand for the same things, exactly. There is no difference in their policies. But then you look closer doesn’t it turn out to be ethnic Catholics, say, or Catholics of an age that does not feel comfortable with a change that changes the racial consistency of their own youth.  

There are people on the streets and on the air who simply refuse to believe that a woman can be considered an equal — and, heaven help them, their actual superior in accomplishment and capacity. That plays into the vote as surely as green apples grow on the trees.

This is not to say that Clinton is supported by bigots or that Obama is backed by women-haters. It is to say that bigots and women-haters exist and vote from that part of their spirit as much as anything else. Period. Well, maybe semicolon. Mrs.Clinton is working the race issue pretty hard, it appears.  No good can come of this; is there no shame left?

What will they do now, the bigots? They will likely have a black guy running against an old guy. There’s a woman guy who played a huge role in the campaigning so far and will have an effect on it for the foreseeable future — notably if she continues her sad, corrosive, destroy-this-party-to-save-it (for herself) strategy.

It may be hard to measure, beyond anecdotally, but is there anyone who doesn’t believe that there’s an element of racial attitudes in some of the concentrations of the anti-Obama vote? Not race as in the positive sense that African-Americans have in one of their own being on the ballot but the negative sense that loathes the idea that someone very much not of their own is there. Does anyone not believe that there is an element of misogyny in the reflexive opposition to Hillary Clinton — or any other woman daring to think about competing as an equal politically, socially or in the marketplace?   Do we imagine even for a second that it is policy alone that sparks the rage and hatred in the hearts of the Rush Limbaughs, with his wife-of-the-week faliures among women? And others?

And what disdain the elderly endure at every turn. Instead of being honored and revered enough for their astonishing contribution, so often they are discounted and quarantined as if they were merely a joke on society.

Tough luck, pals.

One way or the other, the ticket and the future will be full of people who are not all middle-aged white males . Exactly as it should be. It’s about time.