A Class Reunion After Trump
By: Mark Leuchter
Tags: High School, Politics, Religion, Trumpism, Community

My high school graduating class of 1990 is planning a 30-ish anniversary reunion for Summer 2021. But why, at this point, should I want to go?

West Bloomfield High School in West Bloomfield, MI, as it stands today.

I’m part of a social media group for my high school graduating class (West Bloomfield High School, class of 1990), and there has been some recent discussion of organizing a make-up 30th anniversary class reunion since our initial plans were derailed by the pandemic. Upon reading the posts, I chimed in with a simple reply: “I will be happy to see many of you.”

That’s exactly what I meant. We’re all pushing 50, some of us have maintained friendships, some of us have grown apart, some of us were never friends but have no antipathy toward each other. I’d be happy to see many people across those various categories, genuinely.

But my comment received some uncomfortable replies from people who saw something deeper in what I wrote: that there are people from our graduating class that I don’t want to see. They correctly read the implications of my comment because underneath the idealized memory of a mythic past, they know the truth about some of our former classmates — and they don’t want to see these people either.

The last pre-pandemic WBHS Graduation ceremony , June 2019

The last several years have revealed a lot about the people we grew up with, the people we socialized with, the people we may have once considered friends. Our classmates from high school. Congregants at our places of worship. Colleagues in our professions with whom we socialize. A depressing number of them, we now know, chose to tolerate or defend Trumpism, a socio-political vision steeped in fascism, white supremacy, antisemitism, a rejection of science, Christian nationalism, misogyny, systemic racism and poverty, and state-sponsored violence. And many of them still proudly stand by their choice, doubling down on their denials, dismissals and grotesque affirmations.

Some of the people from my high school class made this choice because in their view it was only “the crazies on the right” who harbored violent and bigoted worldviews. Supporting Trump and his policies and attitudes was for them something different, something normal, something even patriotic and honest…and those dangerous crazies would never amount to much.

Mike Flynn, convicted criminal, QAnon conspiracy theorist, and seditionist

But I write this literally a day after the sitting president of the United States took a meeting in The Oval Office with Mike Flynn, a convicted criminal, seditionist, and QAnon conspiracy theory member, who advised him to use the military to overturn a free and fair election. This happened a week after a Proud Boy/white supremacist “Jericho Rally” in Washington DC to support the overturning of the election. Some attendees at this rally wore t-shirts bearing the emblem “6MWE” — “6 Million Wasn’t Enough”, i.e., more Jews need to die through another Holocaust, and prominent advisors to the sitting president of the United States attended that rally and promoted that idea.

A Proud Boy at the “Jericho” Rally in Washington, DC on Dec 12, 2020.

Attendees also ransacked a prominent Black church, tearing apart their “Black Lives Matter” sign and lighting it on fire — essentially, a KKK Burning Cross demonstration. Racist violence has spiked over the last few months at the hands of these people. So no, I don’t want to spend an evening in the company of former high school classmates who look at this and shrug because they don’t believe it affects them personally. People who lack in human empathy are not the company I wish to keep.

Some of the people from my high school class chose to tolerate or defend Trump and Trumpism out of the belief that government should not regulate private life and should have only minor engagement in public life and space. And then — the pandemic hit, something that ONLY a government can combat in terms of resources and administration.

Donald Trump meets with scientists during the Pandemic on the matter of climate change, where he stated publicly that “I don’t think science knows” how natural disasters function (Sept 14, 2020).

But alas, the Trump administration’s plan — as revealed this past week — WAS TO INFECT US. Their goal was to sacrifice innocent human lives (that they believed were expendable) for the sake of maintaining the economy. The immuno-compromised, the elderly, minority communities with systemic public health issues…these were disposable people excess baggage not worth protecting, all for the sake of keeping bars and nightclubs open. And as reported in Vanity Fair a few months ago, a side benefit of this was the calculation that these deaths would compromise confidence in Blue states and help Trump win re-election.

This is literally human sacrifice. And the people who most ardently supported it are overwhelmingly pro-life conservative Christians who proclaim their faith in lock-step with their sense of duty to our constitutional republic. These are the same people who even now invoke the name of God repeatedly to deny election results, spread lies about election fraud and advocate for Trump to remain in power. And many do so even as they hold elected office at various levels of government, factoring sedition and abuse of power into some type performative religious piety.

Evangelicals in Texas, praying for God to intervene and overturn the results of the election, Nov 14, 2020.

Several of the people I went to high school with were on board with this, to different degrees, in different ways. These are not people I want to spend time with. I’m not sure Jesus Christ would want to spend time with them either, at least not the Jesus Christ one encounters in the New Testament. “Republican Jesus” (the title of a superb book written by my colleague Tony Keddie) is the deity these people worship, and he bears little resemblance to Jesus of Nazareth who taught us to love our neighbors, not ransom them for the sake of our 401Ks.

(The relatives of over 300,000 dead Americans would agree with me.)

Then, finally, there is the one person in my high school class who has never accepted a single criticism of Trump’s policies or actions but who accepted every tinfoil hat conspiracy theory tossed his way, who spread antisemitic “blame Soros” memes and lies, who posted publicly “I always said college was a waste of time”, who excused EVERY police shooting of a Black person in this country before I cut off ties with him in 2017 (and I imagine he continued to do so thereafter), and who defended the Nazis who marched at Charlottesville by saying that “they had a permit” while blaming counter-protestors for the violence. This person is not an intelligent man by any stretch, but being stupid is not a license for choosing to embrace evil and call it patriotism.

Joseph Goebbels, the architect of Nazi propaganda, had the following to say about appealing to the uneducated and the simple-minded: “[w]e do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.” It is perhaps not surprising that a stupid man would fall for lies and pernicious fallacies engineered to circumvent the mind and go right to the gut, but it’s not an excuse. The dim-witted are still morally culpable.

These fun-loving young people were workers at Auschwitz, enjoying a day off from murdering Jews and other “undesirables”.

If some of my former classmates are reading this, then you know who I’m talking about. So let me cut to the chase, especially for my fellow Jewish classmates: if we were all living 80 years ago in Germany, this man would be wearing a Swastika on his arm, proudly attending Hitler’s rallies, and would have happily loaded many of us into the cattle cars bound for Auschwitz because the State told him to…all while maintaining his shit-eating “love ya, bro” grin.

I don’t want to spend an evening with him. I don’t want to see him again, ever. And I can’t imagine that many of you want to either. So let us, at last, be honest about something.

We went to high school together. We have a history with each other. But we have also endured a horrid crisis over the last few years that should give us some disturbing revelations about our society and the future in front of us. I would be glad to see many of you, my former classmates, in a future we forge in awareness of those revelations that might give a younger generation a better world than the one we inherited and cultivated over the last 30 years.

But I don’t want to spend another second of my precious time with people who don’t see that, or don’t care to. We’re at an age now where every moment seems shorter than the last because we are now closer to the end than we were to the beginning. Our days are numbered, and they matter. And the simple fact that I have a past history with someone doesn’t mean that I want to make space for them in my future. This is especially the case if they defended or tolerated or excused the damage done by this malicious administration, and the abhorrent culture revolving around it that will endure even after Donald Trump leaves office.

Final scene from the film Grease (1978)

We were brought up with the fairy tale idea that high school automatically forges enduring friendships simply because we spent a few years in the same space, taking the same classes, eating in the same cafeteria, watching the same plays or sporting events. We saw movies that reinforced the view that these experiences would somehow ensure that we’d always be together as friends. But this is an untenable fantasy. “Chang chang changitty chang sha-bop/that’s the way it should be” works for Sandy, Danny, Rizzo, Kenickie, Frenchie, and maybe Eugene. But it doesn’t work for us. It never really did, but we’re at a point where it’s impossible to pretend otherwise anymore.

So…if we do have a high school reunion in July, I will be glad to see many of you. But to some others from my graduating class: I hope to avoid you at our reunion or anywhere else for that matter. Go live your selfish, cruel, myopic lives on your own time. You are not allowed to take any more of mine.