By Richard Black
Like most people, I have some reservations about Donald Trump. Being the father of a six-year-old girl, I’m not a proponent of his “pussy grabbing” initiative but, then again, I don’t understand the nuances of the policy.
For the record, I also don’t have a pussy either, and maybe if I did I’d want it to be grabbed. I had a buddy in college whose girlfriend rammed a finger into his butt while they were having sex and, once he got over the shock, he thought it was pretty cool. Maybe having your pussy grabbed is kind of like that.
Trump’s loss of a billion dollars back in the 1990s gives me some concern but, to be fair, how many of us have actually had a billion dollars? Maybe a billion dollars is really easy to lose. Maybe one day Trump came home and said, “Marla, have you seen the billion dollars I had lying around here? I could have sworn I’d seen it yesterday.”
“I thought it was in your tuxedo pants,” Marla would have said. “No, not those pants; the other ones,” and then Trump would say that he dropped that pair off at the dry cleaners and the billion dollars was probably just gone.
We need to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Sure, it may sound as if he’s said some horrible things, but how are we to really know what the man’s thinking? Isn’t it entirely possible that when he calls for deporting immigrants, he’s really talking about emigrants? I like to think that’s what he means and that instead of deporting millions of people out of the country, he’s trying to get other countries to expel United States expatriates so that they can be welcomed back into the the loving bosom of our country.
Then again, what’s all that bad about being deported? My wife and I spent a week or two in Mexico on the Mayan Riviera and it was simply delightful. Frankly, if someone offered me a free ticket to the homeland, I wouldn’t even have to think about it twice, and my ancestors are from Germany which, for the record, isn’t a great place to go during November.
Are Trump’s comments regarding Muslims and same-sex marriages a bit alarming? Perhaps, but only because they’ve been completely misunderstood. Personally, I think that creating a registry for Muslims is a great idea and I’m not certain why people are against it. I had a registry before I was married, and the wife and I totally raked it in, although I’m still not sure what to do with three Kitchen-Aid blenders.
Frankly, the LGTBQ community could probably also benefit from some sort of registry as well. Not that any of them need help buying gifts except, of course, the “L” part of the acronym. The last time a lesbian bought anyone in my family anything it was a case of PBR and a circular saw for my two-year-old daughter.
The registry I’m envisioning, and what I’m pretty sure Trump is as well, is a national forum in which LGTBQs can find one another, kind of like J Date but without the Jews. It can’t be easy to be gay or bisexual or a lesbian or whatever the “T” and the “Q” stand for these days. Wouldn’t it be nice for them to have a venue to find each other and live in a dull and sexless relationship just like us heteros?
Minorities have every reason to be worried, and as someone who might very well find himself a minority in the near future, I share their concern. Unless Trump’s call for emigrants to come home is heeded, my status as part of the white, upper middle class majority is under threat, but I’m trying to remain optimistic.
Maybe being a minority isn’t all that bad. I’d finally be able to have one of those jobs the “bad hombres” are taking from decent American people. The life of a migrant worker is probably pretty sweet. I imagine it’s a lot like Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ but with Guatemalans instead of drunken beat poets. There’d be lots of fresh air and exercise. I’d even have the camaraderie of my people and all of the fresh fruit I could eat.
I pay a fitness coach, a shrink, and a nutritionist hundreds of dollars every month for that kind of lifestyle, and that’s my point. Some people don’t know how good they’ve got it. The fact is that as a middle-class white guy, I have as much to lose as anyone else.
Our nation’s financial future is uncertain. The market tanked shortly after Trump became President-elect, and with it all hope that I’ll be able to retire by the time I’m 50. Hell, I won’t even be able to fund the mid-life crisis I’ve been planning on. Hand jobs and sports cars aren’t exactly cheap, not to mention hair plugs and Botox.
After having stretched our finances to the edge to make it into a new and larger home, my wife and I are upside down on our mortgage. We’ve got three people living in our home, which wouldn’t be a problem if we had more than two bathrooms. What happens when all of us have to go to the bathroom at once? Chaos, that’s what. We’d been planning on finishing the attic to solve this impending crisis but now…now I’m not sure if we’ll be able to afford the work.
Like everyone, I’ve tightened my belt in expectation of some hard times. Sometimes I only drink local craft beer instead of those pricey West Coast brews. I’m embarrassed to mention that I’ve even started shopping for jeans at the Gap, but I don’t know if it will be enough.
The fact is that, whether it’s a third-floor addition or a few inalienable rights, we’re all going to have to make some sacrifices over the next four years and I, for one, am willing to do my part.
*****
About The Author
Richard Black is a remarkably attractive, remarkably disease-free man in his forties. Unfortunately he’s also married. Prior to his life as a stay-at-home-father Richard spent more than a decade performing various public relations and marketing functions for a number of financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter, Richard enjoys writing the occasional thoughtful post on his blogThe Unfit Father and subjecting the public to his…unique take of fatherhood on a more regular basis. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project and the Anthology “It’s Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth. Follow along on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.