One more little statement about the lesser millions: No one votes for a sociopath for practical reasons

 

You can love a grumpy person. You can love a dog. You can’t love the great outdoors, a river, a cloud, lichen, the wind. Get close to any of those things and you’ll see you’re feeling for yourself. You may have a displaced or projected feeling of compassion or tenderness for an old dying tree (maybe your unconscious is thinking of your father or your lost childhood), but that’s not love. You can’t love a freshly painted wall. You can’t love a lizard or a tarantula.* If you believe you can, you are sloppy and don’t know what love is.

Human consciousness can only love something life-affirming in another consciousness. There could be a rageful and botched man who nevertheless has a positive, injured heart under that surface that may be accessible, making him lovable. But a person who has dedicated every ounce of his being to anger, contempt, and causing pain to others – even though there is his burning baby in the crib beneath it all that had needed to be held – cannot be loved. He has purposely ended his heart by failing to get help.

This is Trump. What people feel for the man is not love or true admiration. It’s impos­sible to love a hateful consciousness.

They should see what they really feel, and who they are.

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* This is a bit more complicated than I'm declaiming here. When I was not yet a teen, I had about a dozen little red- and yellow-eared turtles that I loved at a supernatural level. (This feeling was probably enhanced by their representing my first acts of initiative in my emotionally stunted life: I had shoplifted each one of them from the local Woolworth's department store, and took care of them with a grown-up level of responsibility.) This was, though, the child’s heart, that allowed me to impute a lovely and adorable consciousness to creatures that very likely had no such capacity. I don’t know that this magical goodness should be possible in adults.