“What is wrong with you?”
It’s the question Aunt Sarah asked her nephew, Martin Best, in a recent episode of the new Fox Network series, Best Medicine. Josh Charles plays Dr. Martin Best, a leading surgeon in Boston who gave up his practice and moved to the small fishing village of Port Wenn, Maine where he spent his childhood summers to become the town doctor.
In my opinion Best Medicine is not a very good version of the British counterpart, Doc Martin, though I like Josh Charles and Annie Potts who plays his Aunt Sarah. But a particular scene in a recent episode had a seminal moment in it worth thinking about.
Martin’s Aunt Sarah barges into his office demanding that he explain why he would take the drastic step of persuading the health department to close down the town’s restaurant, The Salty Breeze, because he suspected, wrongly as it turned out, that it was the source of several town residents getting food poisoning.
It was all clinical to him, a necessary step in protecting public health until he knew one way or the other. Aunt Sarah tells him that if he would take the time to get to know the people he would understand that The Salty Breeze was more than a restaurant, that it was the heart and soul of Port Wenn, the hub of activity and sponsor of numerous events, special celebrations, and town meetings, that brought people together.
Shutting down The Salty Breeze, she told him, was like closing down Port Wenn itself, and if the shut down led to its owners, a gay couple named Greg and George, going bankrupt, as it easily could, it would devastate everyone.
Martin was unmoved, insisting that bankrupting The Salty Breeze was a risk that had to be taken. Finally, too exasperated to continue arguing with him, Aunt Sarah turns to leave, stops, turns back, stares him in the eyes for a moment, and asks, “What is wrong with you?”
Her question cut to the chase, pushing aside all the logic his medical mind was telling himself that ignored the human consequences of his actions. He was seeing a public health problem, not the people being affected.
What is wrong with you?
The question exposed the truth. The real issue was not possible food poisoning. It was Martin himself. His aunt Sarah was telling him to stop being a doctor for once and be a human being, to let his humanity guide his decisions and not just his vast medical knowledge. Before he made such a decision about The Salty Breeze, she wished he would consider how his actions would affect the lives of real people, his neighbors, in fact, the people he said he was trying to help.
Since I saw that episode I have wished so much that I could ask Trump supporters that question, especially as the stories of the devastating impact the ICE invasion of Minnesota is having. Not just the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, tragic as that was, but the trauma being inflicted on immigrant children and their parents, the assault of citizens filming the abuse by their own government, and the outright lies Trump and everyone around him keeps telling about what has happened and is happening.
How I wish someone would interview people still supporting Trump and have the courage to ask, “What is wrong with you?”
When the history of this period is written, that will be a primary question future generations will ask themselves when they read about all the people who continued to support Donald Trump in his second term. “What was wrong with those people?” will be the first question they will ask themselves.
Just as we today ask that question about ordinary German citizens who voted for and supported Adolph Hitler, so future generations of Americans will ask the same thing about Trump supporters.
Too early to begin thinking about a post-Trump America? I don’t think so. He really is done, as I said last time. Polls leave no doubt that Minnesotans broke the back of MAGA Republicanism by exposing the sheer inhumanity, cruelty, callousness, and lawlessness of Trump and the people who do his bidding.
Independent voters have joined Democrats not only in rejecting Trump’s policies, but in rejecting Trump himself. The issue is no longer Trump’s incompetent policies. It is, instead, finally about who he is.
There is no coming back for him after Minnesota. He cannot lie his way out of his lies this time. The majority of American voters see him for the man he is and they don’t like what they see.
The reason Trump’s pending end became apparent in Minneapolis is because it came from extraordinary ordinary citizens. The nation had already seen political leaders in L.A. and Chicago stand up to Trump. What happened in Minnesota was that they saw people like themselves by the thousands doing so, and it lit a fire Trump cannot put out.
Trump’s end is now on the horizon, and once he is gone the people who were responsible for our democracy coming under assault by our own president will be asked, “What was wrong with you?”
“We didn’t know” will, of course, be their first excuse. Germans who voted for Hitler and the Nazis said the same thing. But it was no excuse for them, and it will be no excuse for Americans today. Everyone knows that in this age of social media and 24-hour news cycles, whatever they didn’t know was because they didn’t want to know.
“What was wrong with you?” will be the question hanging over their heads. Their families, friends, neighbors may not ask them right out, but they will be asking it to themselves when they are around them or when they come to mind.
As a native Virginian, I quite often ask that question about my distant relatives, local and state political and civic leaders, ministers and churches, all of whom supported slavery and then enshrined discrimination during the Jim Crow era and who fought against integration rather than seeing the evil of segregation. “What was wrong with them?” How could they have done what they did?
I am already asking that question about Trump supporters. “What is wrong with them?” What happened to their humanity? What happened to their moral conscience?
I know, of course, that if per chance I did get to ask them that question, it probably wouldn’t change anything, certainly not immediately, but if they have any humanity left inside of them at all, one day they will look in the mirror and actually see themselves, and then the question will hit them as if I were speaking to them out loud, “What was wrong with you that you thought what you thought and did what you did?”
The only bright spot in this dark scenario is that the question can still be asked in the present tense. Trump supporters still have a chance to look themselves in the mirror and see themselves for who they truly are.
But the day is coming, sooner I suspect than they believe, when the question will have to be asked in the past tense, “What was wrong with you?” By then it will be too late for them to see how morally blind they were when doing what was right was so needed.
What is wrong with you? That is the question that cuts through the noise and chatter of the moment as it calls us to see ourselves and what is happening around us clearly so that our thoughts and actions might reflect the best about us rather than the worst.
linnposts.com 