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I don't know what a "liberal bubble" is, but literally everyone I know hates Donald Trump. There are allegedly a few folks living in little pink houses out in John Mellencamp country who found time to vote for The Donald in between R.O.C.K.ing in the U.S.A and suckin' on chili dogs outside the Tastee Freez, but despite doing everything in my power to raise awareness within those communities, I haven't been able to get through to them. It's almost as if rural conservatives don't read my tweets.
Post-election madness has gripped our nation, but so far, my bubble hasn't faced too many changes. Everything seems pretty much the same except that traffic sometimes gets held up by protesters, upper-middle class white folks are suddenly as terrified as everybody else, and a slew of new terms have forced their way into our popular lexicon. I've seen the words "Demagogue" and "False Equivalency" written somewhere every day since the election, but the phrase I see more often than any other is, "Don't normalize this." And I must to admit, I'm having one hell of a time trying not to normalize something as normal as racists in power. I even looked it up, and it turns out that "pervasive hatred" is actually a synonym for "business as usual."
Granted, Trump's brand of boastful bigotry is a bit more extreme than we've come to expect from our public figures. Usually, politicians at least have the decency to tidy up their intolerance. Our leaders don't normally go as far as Trump did when he generalized a specific race by saying, "They're rapists." They tend to make their prejudice a bit more digestible, like Hillary Clinton did when she alluded to the general concept of urban youths before saying, "They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators – no conscience, no empathy." See how much better that sounds? It's almost like she's my abuela.
It's common to see hateful rhetoric find success within our nation's homogeneous communities. It's ordinary to see racists in power. Historically, it's standard to see disenfranchised members of a political, racial, ethnic, or religious majority accuse and attack the members of a political, racial, ethnic, or religious minority group. The Donald and his ragtag team of supervillainous neo-Nazis didn't create prejudice, they just used it to perpetuate fear and manipulate people into supporting Trump instead of Hillary. Oddly enough, many people only voted for Hillary because they were scared of Trump. It turns out that fear is a marvelous political tactic. In fact, I believe it was the renowned 16th century Italian philosopher Frank Underwood who first said, "It's better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both."
We shouldn't accept widespread hatred simply because it's familiar, and we should continue to fight the ideals embodied by Trump's presidency (and by "fight," I mean "march, tweet, and write opinion pieces for Portland based newspapers"). Part of battling intolerance, though, is admitting that it's normal.