After Donald Trump got elected, many progressives and liberals turned inward, or they turned on each other, trying to put their finger on just who was at fault. I understand the desire to simply look for answers, to gauge your own level of responsibility. Just know that I don’t feel like it’s my fault at all – I voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary and the general, and I openly despised Trump throughout the election. I stand by everything I said, wrote and did. But other liberal/progressives felt differently. Jon Stewart was one of the first prominent progressive voices to basically say that liberals live in an echo chamber and that’s why we lost, that we were too busy scorning Trump and his supporters to realize that we were alienating a lot of “real Americans” or whatever. Anthony Bourdain said something similar too, that coastal elites are smug and contemptuous and that’s why so many Midwesterners and Southerners voted for Trump. And now we can add Zoe Saldana to the mix – she blames “cocky and arrogant” liberals too. Ugh.
It isn’t an opinion heard frequently in the famously liberal Hollywood, but sci-fi queen Zoe Saldana has spoken out against the acting community for bullying abrasive Donald Trump. The “Star Trek,” “Avatar” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” star — who is not a supporter of the Republican president-elect — believes insults flung at him during the race for the White House turned off much of middle America.
“We got cocky and became arrogant and we also became bullies,” the 38-year-old actress said of Trump, who has been frequently berated himself for bullying tactics, including seemingly mocking a reporter with disabilities. “We were trying to single out a man for all these things he was doing wrong… and that created empathy in a big group of people in America that felt bad for him and that are believing in his promises.”
The Trump campaign that defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was criticized for stoking racial tensions with its rhetoric against Mexicans and Muslims, but Saldana is hopeful the country will never return to the dark days of segregation.
“I’m learning from (Trump’s victory) with a lot of humility,” the mother of two-year-old twin boys told AFP. “If we have people continue to be strong and educate ourselves and stand by equal rights and treat everyone with respect, we won’t go back to those times.”
[From Yahoo]
I feel like so many people are still grieving and that’s what this is about too, this inward blame-game. The What-Ifs of it all are part of the stages of grief. What If we weren’t so contemptuous of everything Trump said. What If we didn’t call out Trump supporters for their tacit or explicit support of racism, misogyny and hatred. What If we had done a better job of arguing why Trump should never become president. But here’s the thing… Trump earned our contempt and he’s still earning it every g—damn day. His supporters earned our contempt when they voted for him given everything he said, everything he promised. And I followed the election closely – our side did a really good job of detailing every reason why Trump should not be president. If people chose to believe that was “bullying” or “arrogant,” then they’re the ones with the problem. Is it arrogant or bullying to say that a sexually assailant, a pervert, a racist and an idiot should not be president? Really?
Photos courtesy of WENN.
Source: celebitchy.com
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