So has anyone else been watching the Twilight Zone marathon on the Syfy channel? I am not much of a football fan and frankly, the parades and stuff appeal to me less and less as I age. As well, this year, I am not much in a mood for celebratory parades of any kind.
So I saw that the Syfy channel was running three days of the old Twilight Zone. I came of age when the Twilight Zone hit the air in 1959. I was nearing the age of 14, and beginning to grow independent. Lucky enough to have had parents, who despite having had no opportunity to go to school beyond the 9th grade, (mother 6th), encouraged critical thinking, reading, learning. I found my niche in The Twilight Zone and Mad Magazine. They, along with other factors, e.g. the times, my innate lean toward empathy, started me on my path to liberal, progressive thinking.
So I have been enjoying re-watching all the episodes. Today, one episode in particular, had me thinking of the Trump voter. The episode is called, “The Self-improvement of Salvator Ross”. It just hit me, yet again, how much these shows made me think, re-think and question. This one could have been written for the HERE and NOW.
Salvatore Ross is a young (26) poor, white guy who is angry all the time. Having broken his hand in an altercation of some kind, he is in the hospital with an elderly gentlemen with whom he shares the room. The elderly man reaches out to be sociable and is met with derision and nastiness. The young guy claims his pain supersedes the old man’s illness that was “just a cough” aka pneumonia. The old man explains his cough can kill him while a hand can heal in a young man. So the young man says, unsympathetically, “Yea, I’ll trade ya old man.” And so the Twilight Zone begins. The next morning the old man has a broken hand, painful, while the young man has a cough and is released for not being sick enough. Laughing and with no sympathy for the elderly man, he walks out of the hospital. The young man has a girl, or rather wants a girl. He is hot for her but while she is drawn to his looks and even his tough guy demeanor, she rejects him. She tells him that despite being attracted to him she wants a man LIKE HER FATHER, a man who is compassionate, and loving and was once a teacher. Young guy scoffs at the notion. “What has compassion gotten your old man?” The girl and her father live in a small apartment, a modest life.
Anyway, the guy is the role model of the angry voter for Trump. He despises the old father for his compassion, calls him stupid and swears he will get the girl by becoming rich and poweful. Thanks to his power to trade conditions, he trades his youth, 46 years of it, for money to a rich man. Now being rich be buys back years from young people, $1000 a year until he is back to being young but now rich and young. He goes back to the old man to show him that now HE has it all, money and power to make sure the teacher’s daughter will live the good life. But the old teacher rejects him, trying to kindly explain he wants his daughter to have LOVE, to be loved, to be with someone who like her has compassion for fellow human beings……
As in all Twilight Zone episodes, there is an interesting twist at the end. I won’t tell unless asked. But honestly in Salvatore Ross I saw many, many of the Trump voters...the ones who laughed when he mocked the disabled, the ones who were ready, willing and able to bully women, reporters, people of color whom dared protest Trump. In this character, I saw may of the voters who chanted “LOCK HER UP”, or in Cleveland wore shirts saying, “Hang the C**t”. What they had in common with Salvator Ross was not their whiteness or their gender but their lack of compassion.
Is compassion nature or nurture? I have always wondered. My big sister and I were raised by the same two parents, and she ended up a libertarian leaning republican while I have always been a liberal progressive. Our parents were basically apolitical, though I know cause my mother told me they both voted for FDR, then Truman, then Eisenhower, then JFK. But they were registered republican because of my dad’s sister who worked in the courthouse of our then mostly republican county. While our town itself was a democratic working class steel town, the surrounding area was uber rich as well as burgeoning upper middle class. Getting county jobs, especially summer jobs, meant a republican registration helped.
Anyway, that episode, along with the many discussions here about the Trump voters, to reach out or not, had me pondering the question: Can a non-compassionate person, who can cheer at bullying, become a compassionate person who believes in the common good??? Would love to hear some opinions on this.