Act Of Kindness Triggers A Leftie

My list of sad and awful people grew by one last weeked: Virginia Heffernan. It happened after I read her appalling column in the Los Angeles Times:

“What Can You Do About The Trumpites Next Door?

I don’t usually do this, but I insist you actually read this astounding piece of drivel before you read the rest of my post.

Go ahead. I’ll wait…

Back? Seething? 

Of course you are. Because if there’s one thing I know about most of the people who come to the site every day it’s that we’re all good people at heart. We were raised by decent parents, we fundamentally love our country and although we hold different ideas we don’t hate our neighbors. Even the ones who voted for the other guy.

We may disagree with them. We may think they’re thick. But we still like them, worship with them, go to their weddings and baptisms and bar mitzvahs and funerals because not everything in the word is political to us. 

Virginia Heffernan, however, is not one of us. She lives in Brooklyn and has a second home in a more rural undisclosed area.

She is far luckier than most New Yorkers who have had to soldier through the pandemic in the city.

And even though she doesn’t know it, Virginia Heffernan is fortunate because at her second home, where she has weathered the pandemic, she has kind, charitable neighbors.

Problem is - and she deduced  this from political yard signs - her next-door neighbor is a Trump supporter.

During a recent snowstorm, Virginia Heffernan awoke to find that neighbor, the knuckle-dragger who voted for Trump, had plowed her driveway. Unasked and with no expectation of a thank you.

This gave her so much heartburn she felt compelled to write and spew it.

How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness? She wondered.

This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing.

That’s probably true. And this is precisely the reason many of us who once lived in cities have traded up for the suburbs or small towns.

Ms. Heffernan may not know it, but this is what happens all over America in places not called Brooklyn when there is a problem. Here in hurricane country, neighbors share food, electricity - if they have generators - and chainsaws in the aftermath of big storms. We check in on elderly neighbors. We cook everything in our fast-thawing freezers and share the bounty with the people who live next door. We knock on doors before we make water and food runs to see if anyone on the street needs anything.

The people with gas-heated hot water offer showers to the people - like me - who have electric hot water.

Oh, and no one asks about politics. Ever.

Those of you who took the time to read Heffernan’s column know that she then goes on to compare those considerate Trump supporters to Hezbollah: 

Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon, also gives things away for free. 

Also to that unapologetic anti-semite, Louis Farrakhan.

The same is true with Louis Farrakhan, who currently helms the Nation of Islam. While the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies him as a dangerous anti-Semite, much of his flock says he’s just a little screwy and unfailingly magnanimous. To them.

But her coup de grace is the point at which she compares Trump voters to - you knew this was coming, it’s a favorite of those on the far-left - Nazis. 

Seems when young Virginia was an exchange student in France she stayed with a family of  World War II collaborators. 

When I screwed up the courage to ask how it was for them during the occupation, the lady of the house replied, “We were happy because the Nazis were very polis.” I didn’t know the word, so I excused myself to consult a French-English dictionary. I was in tears when I found the entry: “polite.”

So when I accept generosity from my pandemic neighbors, acknowledging the legitimate kindness with a wave or a plate of cookies, am I also sealing us in as fellow travelers who are very polis to each other but not so much to “them”?

No, Ms. Heffernan, when you accept generosity from people who voted for the Republican in the last presidential race you are not a modern-day Nazi sympathizer. 

She’s un-freaking-believable.

Ms. Heffernan concludes her screed by saying that she will deign to give her neighbors a wave and a thanks, but that’s it. She won’t administer “absolution” to the Trump supporters next door until they renounce their support for the former president and apologize.

In other words, the only way she’ll reciprocate with kindness is if her neighbors repent.

Whether she knows it or not, by penning this ugly column Virginia Heffernan proved that what America needs in order to achieve the much-talked-about unity are more people like her big-hearted neighbors.

And fewer haters like herself.