News by Nature

A 4-minute read.

Shortly after Joe Biden was elected, I received a Facebook message from a friend I’d not heard from since high school. Without so much as a howdy-do, he jumped right in, accusing me of calling half of all Americans morons in one of my less-guarded Trump-bashing posts.

While he never struck me as politically astute, my friend got me thinking. Passing judgment on 20 percent—or even a third—of my fellow Americans is one thing. But when I start condemning half the country, it’s time to double-check my premises.

Even more so now that Trump has been re-elected, and I’m being attacked on all sides by Trump-loving Facebook friends from every social stratum. On one end, there’s my high school buddy, who was never one for holding back.

“Growing up on a farm, I was forced to work with migrants from age eight,” he said in one of his less-guarded messages to me. “They thought nothing of a knife fight. Death meant nothing to them. They’d eat shit that’d make a billy goat puke and bathe whenever. All of them were from the Deep South, whose grandparents were slaves. Every chance they got, I got a taste of slavery.”

It’s easy to see how such a person might come to favor Trump, who clearly has little use for poor people of any color. So, what does my farmer friend have in common with a former newspaper colleague turned county prosecutor—or an economics PhD who writes semi-academic articles on the economy?

They love Trump. And they love arguing with me about my political posts bashing the guy. More important—and perhaps a little disturbing—I can relate to all of them on one level or another.

How does a prosecutor eagerly endorse a president who thinks he is above the law? Mea culpa. Growing up on Long Island’s bountiful East End, I enthusiastically supported ever-stricter local laws on fishing and clamming—even as I ignored them. Those laws were for people who didn’t know the waters like I did.

As for the professor, he’s the embodiment of my Ayn Rand-reading days in college, when I was studying evolution’s role in human behavior. To my way of thinking back then, competition and natural selection were the only ways to advance humanity. Government only got in the way.

Around that time, two things happened that sent my perspective in a whole new direction. The first was talking politics with my father, a Depression-era FDR liberal who dedicated his life to raising five boys while working as a newspaper reporter.

One day, while I charged on with the standard Ayn Rand spiel about government defying Darwin, he said simply: “Just because government doesn’t always work doesn’t mean government always doesn’t work. We may be animals, but it’s only by working together that we can hope to become more. Working together, that’s government.”

At the time, my Ayn Rand steeped mind saw his remark as ignorant—but it stuck with me. He could say so much with so few words. His point was driven home that same year when I took a job working as a weekend counselor at a Long Island orphanage.

These kids, almost all black and Latino, came from the most broken homes in New York City’s most broken neighborhoods. Childhood was spent in a miasma of foster care—being molested, given drugs, beaten, and otherwise completely neglected.

One might argue this was only possible through the very sort of failed government programs Ayn Rand and most Trump lovers loathe. All I came to realize was: these kids stood no chance in the world they were about to enter. And there are millions of them out there.

I tried only to show them the most basic tenets of decency: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Don’t beat up smaller people. Respect your elders. I failed miserably.

The only counselors they showed any respect for were also the toughest. They didn’t try to rationalize with these kids—they issued and followed through on threats. And they got results.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child” might work for kids, but when that standard is applied to adults, people get really angry. Yet it’s becoming the nation’s MO if not motto and my three Facebook friends firmly believe it’s what’s needed to correct the mess they perceive people like me have made of this country.

For decades that prosecutor enforced laws on a revolving door of defendants who keep places like the orphanage—and many large government agencies—in high demand. How do you not lose patience with a system that fixes blame but not the problem?

My professor pal fiercely defends free-market economics as the purest and surest means of meeting people’s needs, citing as proof the failures of more empathetic approaches—i.e., socialism and all those helpful government agencies. History has certainly given him plenty to work with.

Which brings me back to those orphans—and the father they were unable to share with me. Sure, he believed in tough love, speaking softly, only the strong, and a dozen more aphorisms that comprise so much of this country’s culture. But he also understood they were only a means to an end. A last resort used to push humanity when needed, but not a strategy to lead it.

Which is why I can sympathize with my Trump-loving Facebook friends but never join them. Might might work as a reproductive strategy, but it comes at the expense of what I see as humanity’s greatest asset: our ability to join our endlessly creative minds in common cause.

We may be animals, but we’ve tripled our lifespan since we climbed down from the trees. Our big brains made it possible; our increasing cooperation made it happen. Which brings me back to my high school buddy and a Trump-lover philosophy I can at least respect, even as I passionately disagree.

“You can only live off the land by taking what the land naturally provides,” he said. “If you take whatever you want, Mother Nature will take it back, with interest. Within the next century or so, Mother Earth will shed humans like dead skin. She has the patience and time. Man has neither. We’re our own worst enemy.”

Not when we’re working together. I can’t fault Republicans losing patience with endlessly inept Democratic efforts to reign in the national debt and government waste. But blowing up 80 years of cooperative effort that made America great, with no plan in place sounds more like giving up on what makes humans great.