This is relatively out-of-character for me, this occasional lottery ticket purchase, as I am by-and-large a very practical person when it comes to how I run my life. I sometimes think that people confuse responsible with "not fun" (and perhaps sometimes, even with me, with good reason), but I do think of myself as a fun person...but I am confident I'm a responsible person. When it comes to the standards I hold for myself, they are pretty high, and I pride myself in working hard to achieve them. If I have a goal, I do the work to reach it, and I rarely give up if I don't get there right away. I am planful when it comes to goals, writing them down, systematically crossing them off each month (we talked about this a lot here if you're into this, as I have a lot to say about the matter).
And I am very conservative with my finances. I never spend money I don't have, and I make a point of trying to save money when I can. I do financial audits of what I spent cash on at least a couple of times a year, trying to see where I can trim some of the fat. I'm not cheap (I like quality things), but I am also someone that is willing to save to get them, and am willing to make sacrifices to do it. I sleep in my guest bedroom basement all summer, for example, to save on air conditioning costs, and rarely eat out. I wear the same clothes for years at a time-if a shirt has entered my house, my friends will be stuck seeing it on me for the next decade. I enjoy spending money on treats like books & movies, and set aside a little each month to do that, but by-and-large pretty much every dollar that leaves my house has gone through a screening, an allocation so that it won't come back as a surprise that I need that money later in the month.
However, the way that I spend my paycheck has never influenced my politics. For starters, while I have frequently gone with less because I couldn't afford more (and have had months where I was barely making ends meet as an adult), I have been very blessed (knock on wood) in terms of my financial security in my life. I do not have rich parents, but I never worried about where my meals were going to come from when I was growing up, and while I paid the bulk of my student loans, I'll own I didn't pay all of them by myself. I have never been laid off (again, knock on wood) but I am aware that this is something most people experience in their lives and at some point I could well also; both of my parents, deeply hard-working people, were laid off at some point in their careers-half of all Americans experience it during their lifetimes, in fact. I am extremely responsible with my money, but I'm not dumb-I know that because of bad luck (medical, occupational, etc) people have problems outside of what they can do in front of them, and so I support programs like unemployment, Medicaid, WIC, & SNAP because I know that there but by the grace of God go I.
What I've never understood, though, is laziness as an excuse...or wanting something for nothing. I buy that lottery ticket to daydream, not as something that I actually think I deserve to win. When "wanting something for nothing" is used in a political sphere, it's usually Republicans criticizing Democrats, but I've long thought it should be the other way around. I think things like free community college or free health insurance are great ideas-we all pay in, we all get the rewards. It's why I support public education, libraries, Medicare, & Social Security. What I have never understood is trying to blame your problems on excuses, and trying to cheat your way to the top, oftentimes either at the chagrin of other people, or by stupidly thinking you have a magical formula that no one else does.
This, more than maybe anything else about Donald Trump, I have long found an impossible thing to wrap my head around. Donald Trump is easily the laziest person I have ever seen in American politics, and I don't just mean this in the conventional sense (though given how often he golfs & eats McDonald's, it's also true there). I'm talking about his inability to want to come up with actual solutions to problems. This week he introduced tariffs that will essentially destroy America's international reputation, much of our financial infrastructure, and risk us becoming a second world country akin to what happened to Russia in the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. Trump is not doing this because it's logical, and he's not doing it because it's based on a specific ideology. He is doing this because he is so utterly convinced he is a genius, a man of vision, that anything he says must end up being true. That Trump has never done any actual work to become a visionary or an intellectual, living off of his father's money and declaring bankruptcy six times, getting married three times & literally not even bothering to write his own bestseller. He has coasted his entire life...even the show that launched his comeback bid that resulted in him taking the White House, The Apprentice, was based on the genius of producer Mark Burnett, not Trump.
The idea that this man might have all of the answers, that he might be a genius, that his message has any resonance baffles me. The concept of being so out-of-tune with your own day-to-day life that you can find this type of laziness appealing, that you think it could even be a good idea...it hurts my brain it's so foreign to me. I believe in hard work...nothing about MAGA is hard work. It's not even selfish-that would at least make sense. Virtually every person in America is going to suffer from these tariffs...hell, virtually everyone in the world will suffer from them, and not a single one of his supporters can come up with a valid, fact-based argument as to how this will help them (mostly because there isn't one). They either seem convinced that their lives were so miserable under Obama & Biden that nothing else could possibly be worse, or they are gleeful at the prospect of people that they hate (i.e. Democrats) also suffering along with them.
I just...I've never been that miserable. I've never hated someone so much that I actively was willing to ruin my life just to make theirs bad too. I've never been so lazy as to think that other people are the cause of every single injustice and misery in my own personal life. I've never had so little wherewithal to assume that "playing the victim" was the only card in my deck. I get that society can shape our destiny...again, this is why I support social safety net programs, because I get that we cannot completely control our fate. But every day I think about the consequences of my actions, and how they will impact not just those around me, but also my life, and how I can work to make it better. And I've never actively risked everything in my life to throw a "Hail Mary" pass that everyone in my world was saying was a cataclysmically bad idea...without any clue of what would even happen if it somehow connected.
Trump's economic decisions this week are the actions of a madman, someone so bereft of accomplishment that he has spent decades trying to scream "look what I did!" to things he had no hand in achieving...an empty life, one without any sense of genuine pride or valor. But that this is appealing to so many people in this country, that so many people admire his lack of work ethic & logic, and view it as aspirational...I'll never quite get over it. It will always feel alien to someone who, sometimes to a fault, always believes that the only path forward is the one that you're willing to walk yourself.
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