I once shared a bed with a skunk, and got away without a stench.
I was camping. The rain was hard outside my tent, and loud as I drifted off to sleep. Sometime later that night, I was awakened by something wet brushing my face. Thinking it meant that I had a leak in the tent roof, I turned on a lantern I kept by the bed. And then I saw what was brushing my face. The dripping tail of a skunk. He was next to my head, snorting (yes, they snort, almost like pigs) and rooting around for something. Since he hadn’t given me the business yet, I decided to watch, hoping neither of my young daughters on the beds to the other side of me and my new friend would awaken. Little ones sometimes mistake a skunk as a friendly creature, since skunks don’t run away. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it turn out badly.
Where was I? Oh, the rooting around. As it happens, one of my daughters had left a pack of twizzlers, open, on the tent floor. As it turns out, that was what brought my friend to see me. He spent a leisurely amount of time eating what were now his twizzlers, and then went back to where he’d made himself an opening by pushing up enough on the tent door zipper to allow him to squeeze into the tent. He got in, but for some reason, he couldn’t figure out how to get back through the door to get out. I decided to take a chance that our new friendship would stand the test of time, and I slowly sat up, and very gently opened the zipper up some more. The skunk looked at my hand, and then looked at me, and then bade me farewell, leaving by the newer and bigger exit I’d made for him to use. Relieved, I immediately zipped the tent back up, and then tied the upper zipper to the lower zipper with a shoelace to make sure that it wouldn’t ever be so easy to open again. And I went back to sleep, this time without another interruption.
The skunk, as it turned out, could be reasoned with, in a manner of speaking. If I provided the skunk with something that made it happy, then the skunk would leave me without causing any trouble. This is a far different experience than most people have with a scorpion that gets in bed with them, something I’ve been witness to but never experienced myself. It would seem that if one has a scorpion in the bed, any movement at all results in being stung. It doesn’t matter to the scorpion whether or not you might be trying to help it find its way out, or even if you have something in the tent that it might want. The scorpion sees you as an enemy, and you will be stung for any movement you make, or perhaps for no more than breathing and annoying it.
In the political climate we live in today, I see more traditional conservatives as the skunks. I don’t want to hang out with them, and I’m wary of them at all times, but I think that if I give them some of the things that they want, they might well leave me without a need to shower 50 times and burn my clothes. Some of the “skunks” I can think of right off the bat include Lisa Murkowski, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, perhaps even Jeff Flake and Mitch McConnell. I think we probably ought to open up a dialogue with them and see what we can find to agree on. But I also see many scorpions among the right wing today. People like Trump. Louie Gohmert. Steve King (of Iowa.) Paul Ryan. Jim Jordan (of Ohio.) And most certainly, Trump’s support base is a nest of scorpions that is simply impossible to try to communicate with. They see you and me, and most of the people I mentioned, as enemies to be stung and brought down. There is no hope for any form of dialogue with them, as they’d rather destroy us than give an inch regarding lunatic, Nazi-inspired worship of the moron presently occupying the White House. As they are poisonous and hostile, we can’t do anything but try to contain them. And that means we’re going to have to hold our noses, let the skunks in the tent, and ask them if there’s anything we have that they might like to sample. The sooner someone opens and sustains some kind of real dialogue with them, the sooner we can send them on their way, and prepare ourselves to begin evicting the scorpions from the government, at all levels.
We should stock up on tomato juice, just in case. But I’m hoping we won’t have to use it, at least not right away. Let’s see if some kind of sane coalition is still possible. We’re already in a majority. If we can bring some of them along, we’ll be an unstoppable one.