By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--July 4, 2017
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The Washington Post clearly intended this story as a demonstration of how awful Donald Trump supporters are. I don't think they accomplished that goal. I think they accomplished the opposite.
But I doubt they're self-aware enough to realize that.
The story concerns a doctor named Ayaz Virji, who is Muslim, and who recently moved to the town of Dawson, Minnesota and liked it very much. He liked the community. He liked the people he met. He felt welcome. It seemed like the sort of place where he could stay and be happy.
And that was how it was going in Dawson, even through an election season that Ayaz found increasingly disturbing, as Trump kept whipping up crowds by saying that maybe Syrian refugees were part of a secret army, and maybe he’d have to shut down mosques, and maybe Muslims were the one immigrant group that could not become fully American. All of that was in the air, but in a county that Barack Obama had won twice, Ayaz saw only two “Trump-Pence” yard signs during the whole campaign. He never thought Trump would win, much less in Dawson. The morning after the election, he was shocked and angry, and when he looked up the local results before he went to work, the feelings only intensified. Not only had Trump won the county, he had won Dawson itself by six percentage points.
By the time he got to the hospital, he was pacing up and down the hallways, saying he hoped people realized that they just voted to put his family on a Muslim registry, and how would he be treated around here if he didn’t have “M.D.” after his name? People tried to reason with him. A colleague told him it’s not that people agreed with everything Trump said, and Ayaz said no, you’re giving them a pass. He told the hospital’s chief executive that he was thinking of resigning, and she told him to take some days to cool off. He and Musarrat talked about what to do. He began investigating a job in Dubai. He spoke to his brother in Florida, an investment adviser, who had received a fax after the election that read, “Get the f--- out of my country you Muslim pig,” and was moving to Canada. Musarrat kept thinking about the time after Sept. 11 when a man had chased her with a baseball bat, yelling about her headscarf. Nothing like that had happened in Dawson, but the Virjis began feeling differently about the town. They wondered whether the people who had seemed so warm were secretly harboring hateful thoughts or suspicions about them. Musarrat told Ayaz that she noticed more silence from certain friends. Ayaz was stopped on a sidewalk by a woman who said, “Jesus loves you,” and wondered what would happen if he said, “Muhammad loves you.” Another day, he ran into a patient who told him that a lot of farmers had voted for Trump because of sky-high health insurance premiums, not because of “anything racial,” and please, no one wants you to go. Ayaz wasn’t sure whether to believe that. But he and Musarrat decided to stay, at least for the time being, and he tried to transform his anger into understanding. Maybe people really didn’t know, he told himself. Maybe people were suffering in ways he didn’t understand.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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