Charlotte Meehan

I know all about Donald Trump, what he’s doing to get himself elected, and how he’s manipulating his “average American” followers into believing his message. Why do I know? I grew up in a paranoid household in the 1960s and 1970s.

My father spent the entire $30,000 profit on the sale of our house in Bridgeport, Conn., by stocking up on Beehive freeze-dried food in preparation for the crash of the country. He also bought 60 acres of land in upstate New York, with some of his like-minded friends, where they planned to take refuge when everything fell apart. They had guns at the ready to “shoot any n------” who would come after their food, and they made plans to build bunkers.

The food stayed in a large truck bed on the property for more than 20 years and eventually was contaminated by weather, vermin and time. The bunkers never came to fruition. The paranoia remained but found other points of focus, such as the devil’s hand in my brother’s drug addiction. “We live in Satan’s kingdom,” my father often said. He also told one of his young John Birch Society protegés on a regular basis that “terrorism is the answer.” Birchers viewed communists as terrorists and despised them, but he didn’t see the irony. Trump is capitalizing on this unintegrated mentality, as well as engendering it.

Lest you assume that my parents, James and Olive Meehan, were uneducated, backwater folk, I should say that my father began his studies at MIT at age 16 and my mother was a registered nurse trained in Montreal, having attended a convent school for the whole of her childhood education. Once in my early 20s, when she mentioned the devil to me while driving on the highway, I laughed and said, “I don’t believe in the devil.” She became so upset, and started driving so erratically, that I had to change my answer. “Of course I believe in the devil. I was just kidding,” I said, to which she replied, “Well, thank God at least you still believe in the devil.”

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Trump knows there are people all over this country who think in these stark terms of good and evil, who live in a conscious-unconscious racist mindset that fills them with rage about having seen an African-American president win two terms, and who feel buoyed by Trump’s frequent and reckless encouragement of violence. His twisted message of patriotism is actually one that elevates white supremacy, vulgarizes the American dream as one that values material wealth above all, and normalizes hate as a way to maintain socioeconomic position.

Even as a child growing up in an environment where my father referred to Martin Luther King as Martin Luther Coon, I knew this hatred and foul talk were wrong. Likely, my siblings and I understood this because we, too, were victims of my father’s violence, and we identified with the others at whom he was taking aim. In that sense, we were lucky. He did not succeed in stripping us of the most basic of human qualities and the cornerstone of civilization: empathy.

Trump is inciting the worst aspects of the human condition, those that make us small, weak, fearful and dangerous. Enacting dominance over others, rather than celebrating difference, cooperating and finding what we have in common, is the most destructive way forward I can imagine. And Trump doesn’t mind doing it because, above all, he’s a salesman. If it sells, he’ll promote it — at any cost, even if it kills us. The worst part of all, the lowest aspect for me of what he’s doing, is that he doesn’t even believe it himself.

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As someone who had to reject her parents and their toxic beliefs, who spent many painful years learning how to want to be alive, and who has come out the other side knowing that love and kindness are the only way forward, I tell myself that Trump will not be the next president of the United States. Like President Obama, I believe in the good sense of the American people.

Nonetheless, I write this because I am intimately acquainted with those who are not sensible. My father died 22 years ago of brain cancer, which confirmed what I always knew. He was sick in the head. My mother has softened with age, but even now at 86 still says things such as, "We're not all meant to be equal, you know." I must admit that this moment in our country fills me with sadness, as I truly believed the progress of these past eight years had shown us the way to a future of hope. Clearly, that’s something we must continue to work hard to preserve and nurture.

Charlotte Meehan is playwright-in-residence at Wheaton College and artistic director of Sleeping Weazel, which this month premiered her play, Cleanliness, Godliness, and Madness: A User's Guide, at Boston Center for the Arts.

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