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Strangers among us
We think we know people pretty well, especially our loved ones and best friends, but we really don't know them very well at all. The best way to wrap your head around this concept is to think about how much you hold back from the people that are near and dear to you. We hear people talking about how they're an "open book" and "what you see is what you get" but that's rarely the case. All of us have a private side we reveal to very few people if any. Some people call it a dark side where attitudes and behaviors dwell that aren't socially acceptable and that no one knows about except us.
Why are we like that and what caused it? It goes all the way back to the beginning of time when man first walked the earth, long before there were norms, values and morals. It was survival of the fittest back then and the only thing around to constrain one's behavior was someone else bigger and meaner than you. But as man progressed and evolved, rules did take shape. People began to realize they couldn't do whatever they wanted to do whenever they wanted to do it so norms came into being to govern our behavior. This was the beginning of the private side that all people possess because it was no longer socially acceptable to do and say whatever we wanted. As society became more modern and more sophisticated, that private side we possess has grown larger and larger.
The most striking example of this was the presidential election process that just ended a couple of weeks ago. Few people gave Donald Trump a chance because he evidently had no filter to his thoughts. If he thought it or he thought you would like to hear it, he said it, unlike any presidential candidate that had run before. He hid no feelings and pulled no punches and this delighted a segment of the American population who were sick and tired of the political correctness emanating from the liberal side of the Democrat party.
Trump knew he had struck a nerve; he had tapped into something that no one else had ever thought was worth mining and, in doing so, gave him his only chance at being elected President. What amazed me through the whole process was the reaction of the Democrats. They literally put their hands over their ears because they didn't want to hear the things he was saying and by doing that, they galvanized the other side. I remember the night the video was released of Trump's conversation with one of the Bush boys on the bus about how women are attracted to money and power and how he could do anything to them he wanted to do. The Democrats were shocked, even outraged, that a presidential candidate would say such a thing. Lawrence O'Donnell, a Democrat who has his own show on MSNBC, was perhaps the worst, taking almost a holy attitude of disgust at what Trump had said. Trump said it was locker room talk and Democrats said it wasn't because that wasn't the kind of thing Democrats talked about in the locker room.
The Democrats were lying. That WAS locker room talk and it's the kind of conversations guys have every day about women. They don't tell the women and they don't make those comments in front of women but they sure make them to each other. So once again, Trump supporters, including a majority of women who voted, were disgusted at the Democrats' naiveté and their assessment of the world we live in.
Trump spent most of the primary and general campaign speaking from his dark side and suffered few negative consequences for it because he had touched a chord with those people who agreed with him. So what wasn't acceptable conversation in mixed company a year ago now is because Donald Trump has made it so.
It's at least acceptable in Donald Trump's world and if Democrats don't learn how to deal with it and respond to it, they'll have eight years of Trump instead of four.