Hard to believe

I read a couple of posts on Facebook this past week that were pretty hard to believe. One said they would trust a Russian before a Democrat and the other asserted that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the two biggest terrorists in the world.

We’ve always had partisan politics because each side has what they believe to be their own best way of governing and it tends to conflict directly with the way the other party sees it. But we didn’t use to get vile over our differences. In fact, we tried to compromise and find a middle ground that gave each side some of what they wanted instead of all of it and that seemed to work well regardless of who controlled Congress or the White House.

We don’t do that anymore. Senator Mitch McConnell refused to bring Barack Obama’s selection for Supreme Court Justice to a vote because he didn’t want Obama to have any chance at all of having his nominee approved. Later, after Trump was elected, Congress fast-tracked his Supreme Court nomination and approved him quickly, much the same way as his second pick will be handled.

So that’s a microcosm of the fear and distrust we have of each other in today’s political world but it doesn’t compare to believing Russians over American Democrats. Russia has been our arch foe since the end of World War II, almost 75 years. And they have not just been our foe, they’ve been our mortal enemy. We went through an almost thirty year Cold War with them where hundreds of nuclear-armed weapons were aimed at each country by the other, promising the end of the world as we knew it if someone ever pushed the button first. Thankfully no one did but each side came dreadfully close more than once.

I remember Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev banging on the podium at the United Nations with his shoe, yelling out that the Soviet Union would bury us. He later decided it was more likely that we would bury ourselves.

We all remember the race to space and how devastated we were as a country when the Soviets put a man in space before we did. That was the first real proof that we were equal adversaries and it sent chills down the spines of most Americans.

So for a native-born American to post on social media in so many words that he was more likely to side with Russians instead of Democrats should make us just as concerned about the state of relations in our country as the Cold War did. Five years ago, it was impossible to imagine this being said by anyone but a foreign revolutionary and now it’s being said by your neighbor.

I’ve known this person for a long time and although our opinions differ on politics, we’ve managed to keep politics out of our discussions to the point of becoming friends, at least I thought. But the idea that he would trust a Russian before he trusted me gives me cause to wonder. He knows me and I’m not sure he knows any Russians. But because his leader seems to like Vladimir Putin, he likes him too, just like all the other hard-core Trump supporters who never see Trump doing or saying anything wrong, even though it’s perfectly clear to the rest of the world that he does. Putin is a former KGB officer, an egotist, and a self-proclaimed savior of Russia, so it’s understandable that two arrogant men who share similar qualities would be enamored with each other. But because Putin has been on the world stage much longer than Trump, it seems obvious to me that he’s playing Trump rather than the other way around.

And, because Trump’s hard-core supporters believe everything he says and does, the comment about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama shouldn’t come as a great surprise either, although those kinds of comments about the other party weren’t heard very often before the social media age.

The friend who posted the comment about Russians and Democrats has a son in the military. If someone would have told me a couple of years ago that he might someday be fighting the Democrats instead of the Russians, I would have laughed in their face.

Now it doesn’t seem so funny.