And the way the internet erupted a year ago when Donald Trump won the electoral college, and the presidency of the United States. Today I read an article where people are in utter outrage (commentators as well as media outlets) because our current FLOTUS is cutting back a tree that stands on the White House grounds. For whatever reason, it triggered a memory I have from high school, where I learnt a lot about social outrage.
It was in 2004 - I would have been in Grade 10, and the world was watching the US election to see if George W. Bush would serve a second term. My social studies teacher decided to hold a mock election to teach us about the electoral college (I’m Canadian). He wrote down the name of each state and how many electoral votes each state carried. Because there were fewer students than states, each student received at least 2 slips of paper. I had Florida and Utah. I can’t recall how our teacher organized it, but I think he had us go from smallest to largest vote, which left me as one of the last to cast my vote. The entire class was enjoying it immensely, myself included. One of the guys in my class cast his votes for the Rhino party, and several jokingly voted for the Republicans. Our teacher kept tally of the votes on the whiteboard so we could watch the progress.
Quick diversion into back story - I was raised in a highly conservative family. My father is highly politically charged, and I grew up with a stay-at-home father who ran an incredibly right-leaning news publication. I was, in my opinion, completely indoctrinated from a very young age to believe certain things, and in high school I was one of the few students who openly claimed conservative political values. I will follow with my current life views after finishing my story.
Back to the moment in my memories - When it was my turn to cast my vote for Florida, the class had through their own amused devices made it so that the Republicans and the Democrats were very close to tied. My teacher called the student with Florida to the front of the class, and up I went and cast my vote for the Republican party, securing the win for that party. You should have heard the outrage in that classroom. The entire room was shrieking that it wasn’t fair, and that my vote shouldn’t count.
This is the moment I will never forget. My teacher gave me a look, of shame, apology, and guilt, and cast the vote for the Democrats instead. I have his face in that moment seared into my memory, because he knew what he was doing was wrong. I got sent back to my seat, and it was never spoken of again.
That day, I learned some hard lessons. That instance (and others quite like it) embittered me at a very young age. I learned that people act in their own self-interest no matter what the reward. My teacher gained nothing by sabotaging my choice, and in fact could have used that class as a teaching moment to teach the whole class that decisions have consequences, and if you don’t take your decisions seriously, then someone who does take it seriously instead will get what they want at your expense. Instead he decided to teach me that no one is above their own wish fulfillment. He taught me that I could be exposed to ridicule and contempt from my peers with no protection from the people in authority who weren’t supposed to let those things happen. It also taught me that social outrage trumps personal beliefs every time.
Today, I am not a conservative. My life views have shifted to a place where I am incredibly moderate - I don’t hold either the moral values that conservatives believe in, or the way that liberals choose to handle financial matters. Both parties are deeply flawed and polarized, and I can’t and won’t cast a vote for either. However I believe to my very core that the amount of virulence, contempt and outright hatred that the left subjects any conservative-leaning individual to is absolutely inappropriate. Social outrage is a tool that people use to shame them into toeing the line, but that doesn’t translate into action, and all it does is create hostility. Bush won the second election, then Obama, and then after his two terms, we thought for sure our social outrage was a key component to ensuring that Trump would never win the presidency. The roar of surprise and hatred on the internet the day after the votes were counted in November 2016 reminded me of that day in high school, and in fact parallels so strongly for me that I can hardly bear it - the popular vote was for Hillary, but Trump won the college. Likewise in my class, the class was obviously mostly Democrat, but because of whatever hubris caused them to cast their votes against the Dems, the Republicans won the electoral college.
Tell me, where is the demand for electoral reform? There is so much outrage over Trump’s vacation time, and Christmas cards, and yet I don’t see the one phrase that would ensure that this farce of an election never happens again - “Get rid of the electoral college”. All this outrage does is fuel the hostilities but doesn’t harness it into any positive or meaningful change. And our children are being subjected to it, for the crime of being born to parents who hold certain beliefs that aren’t socially acceptable. I was one of those children, and it has left marks in me that shouldn’t be there.
My only hope is that one person reads this and considers that maybe there is a grain of truth in this story. I don’t want to change anyone’s mind about right vs left, right vs wrong, or any of it. I just wanted to share this memory and hopefully purge the sting I still feel from my psyche.
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