“Victim. Noun: A person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action.” – Dictionary.com.

As I sat in my hospital chair with an IV taped to my arm yesterday, getting my heart checked out, I talked with three women, hospital workers,  about why they voted for Donald Trump. As I drove home, I kept thinking about what it was that was so familiar about parts of that revealing conversation.

I had heard the same language so many different times, from so many different people, and then it struck me. These women, these Donald Trump women, the famous 52 per cent of voting women, direct and plain-spoken, were victims. They spoke the language of victimization – they had been hurt, abandoned, harassed, frightened, humiliated, marginalized.

For months, all during the presidential campaign and especially after, I heard some of this same language from many women, in the media,  and some in my life, immigrants, African-Americans, Mexicans transgender and gay people, Democrats, progressives,  Muslims, Mexicans, the young.

Wherever he went, Donald Trump left a victim behind, he was a one person Victim Machine. And there were many victims before him.

And now, I realized, I was hearing the very same words of victimization from these women in the hospital,  from the people everyone seems so angry and bewildered by. It turns out they are victims, too. Their anger and grievance was just as real as anybody else’s, certainly to them.

But how I wonder, does someone like me process this Community Of Victims? Where do the moral people go to find their footing in such a sea of complaint and grief?

What surprised me this year was that the victimization all seemed to be real to one degree or another, not false, authentic, not indulgent. So I had to ask myself, are we such a bad and evil country that we have spawned so many victims, or are we a good country dealing the life, as every nation has for all of human history. There have always been victims, it seems a fundamental part of the human condition.

An evangelical woman wrote me that religious people are under attack, misunderstood and persecuted.  She said she was being denied her religious freedom. College students are feeling victimized by Donald Trump, by books, by disturbing ideas, by discussions in their classes.

I got an e-mail from a Jewish political committee concerned that Jews were being targeted by anti-semites, and I saw a statement from a white nationalist organization claiming they had been victimized, persecuted for years by federal agents and community organizations. Ranchers in the Northwest are victims of their government, so are Native-Americans seeking to protect their water and sacred lands.  People e-mail me every day proclaiming a new Nazi era in America.

A few months ago, in the news, I saw a student at Yale University, where people from all over the world go to think and learn, look into a camera and say with great conviction that the school must create safe zones where students could go to be protected from frightening or disturbing or offensive ideas. I am a writer and former journalist, and at first I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and then I saw a Dean of the college tell her that the school had failed to keep her safe. He apologized to her, rather than suggest she find another school (maybe Liberty University in Virginia where different ideas are  strictly forbidden anywhere on the campus.)

This student, so fortunate to be at a place like Yale, which would never have admitted me,  was a victim too. I wondered what a Syrian mother who lives in Detroit and saw her two boys drown in the Mediterranean sea would say, watching that interview.

This morning, at the Motor Vehicle Agency office where I went to get my license renewed, the clerk asked me if I wanted an “enhanced” license, to help me travel overseas. No, I joked, I didn’t need one, I am pretty happy being here. She stopped and looked me in the eye, and said “well, God Bless you, you are the first person I have heard say that for a long time.”

I blessed her back.

On the way back I hard a gun owner saying on the radio that he could finally have some peace, his guns were safe, he and others had been persecuted for eight years and lived in constant fear.   He had four rifles now, he said, these were frightening years for him. He said he had been a victim of persecution, they were after his rights and his freedom.

Police officers are now victims and well as guardians, claiming to be  targeted by unknowing prosecutors and self-righteous mobs. And some have been tragic victims, killed while doing their work. There are victims of them as well,  some of the people they are supposed to serve are among the most poignant and jarring victims of all.

And here, sitting in this hospital room, I was hearing the very language of victimization from rural nurses and technicians, even in triumph. There are no jobs, they said, their children have no opportunity, they are killing themselves and becoming addicts. Nobody cares about them, liberals hate them, politicians are corrupt.

Why did I have this sinking feeling they would be victims again, and soon?

Donald Trump himself was our National Victim, persecuted by the media, Democrats, fellow Republicans, conservatives,   liberals, insiders, lobbyists and elitists, a string of female accusers.  His campaign itself was a populist Victimization Tour, a gathering of angry victims, it sometimes appeared. He spoke to victims all across the country, his list of outrages was very long,  and they cheered back, loudly and continuously, a celebration of their shared victimhood.

And then, those chilling voices of women, foreigners, Muslims, gay people, immigrants who are taunted and terrified and vilified by people who claim to be patriots. They are at the top of the list for me. Victims again.

Being a victim, I thought, is no fun, there is no joy in it. The DMV clerk  is right, I’m not sure I have ever seen anyone on cable news saying their life was full and rich, and they were happy to be in this great and prosperous land.

So in this awful campaign, it seems the victimizers were also the victims. There are victims of victims, new victims every day. I am losing track, my head is spinning trying to sort it out. Where do I belong in this, there are too many victims for me to even grasp, let alone help or empathize with? Political Correctness feels sometimes like an over-inflated balloon, perhaps it has finally blown up.

A friend told me the other night that she simply could not understand how so many women could support a man who treated women so cruelly and insensitively as Donald Trump. I said it was important not to gather all of the righteousness to ourselves and deny it to everyone else.  Nobody owns all of it. None of us are without flaws.

You are not different from them, I told my friend, you are all the same, we are all the same.

I said that her friends were saying the same thing about her, as she was saying about them:  how could she possibly vote for so hateful, corrupt and untrustworthy a person as Hillary Clinton? We are always looking in the mirror.

Our world is becoming monochrome, no colors or shades, only  black and white. How confusing for me, a man who lives in the grays and colors.

It is not for me to say that anyone’s claims of victimization are false, many are so clearly true. But if they are all true, then perhaps we have more of a community that one might think. We have a common language, common value systems, a way to talk to one another, perhaps a way to stand in one another’s shoes.

We are considered among the safest and most prosperous nations in the history of the world, but there are victims everywhere.

Social media is a great feeding ground for victims, a fuel and enabling stop sometimes.  On Facebook and Twitter, there is nothing easier in all the world than being a victim. It just takes a tap on the “follow” icon. You are never alone.

I realized that one one of the reasons I was connecting with the nurses in the hospital was that I was speaking to them in the language of a sympathizer, something well meaning people are trying hard to do and learning to do. You can hardly go outside without encountering a victim.

There was a message and a lesson in this for me. I think the essence of political correctness, for good and bad, revolves around  the language of victimization and our sensitivity to it. What we hear and don’t hear, what we say and don’t say. I don’t like political correctness because empathy shouldn’t be faked, it means nothing if it isn’t real.

Could it possibly be true, I wondered, that we are all victims? That our Republic is especially cruel and miserable?

Is that truly the humane and just way to look at it? Is it true that something about our life and values and our systems of government, work and health are creating a universe of victims. We are all, in one way or another, crying out for justice, recognition and redress, we all see others as evil and dangerous.

Content people do not make the news, if the exist at all,  they are invisible in our culture, as are the aged and the poor, perhaps the greatest victims of them all. I can hardly imagine anyone going on Facebook to say life is good, and I am grateful for it. I try to say it on my blog at least once a week. And I mean it.

So perhaps this is what really divides us, or is it something that unites us in a common language, a common way of looking at the world. Everyone is out to get us, is that a value system?

We all want to be heard.

There are some people  – gay and trans people, African-Americans, women, Syrian refugees,  child victims of abuse  – whose stories stand out. They have been victimized beyond anything I have experienced or can imagine. And they are being heard.

Yet these women, these Trump supporters, have also suffered grievously in a value system that has ignored and abandoned them, and has almost forgotten that they exist at all. They have languished for decades beyond the consciousness of the true elites who run the country and ratify our beliefs.

The rural disenfranchised are different, at least until now, they have no activists, no media coverage, no leaders or protesters, they are never seen on cable news channels, they have no agenda other than frustration and a wish for the better days to magically return.

The spiritualists and philosophers say that any society whose ideology revolves around greed and money and conflict is doomed to be unhappy and unfulfilled. We are a capitalist culture, and we worship profit and loss above all things, every value and good is subordinate to money.

Did I miss it, or did any candidate running for any office utter a spiritual or uplifting word anywhere in the country?

People who live hollow lives, who are angry and full of grievance, who are driven by security and struggling to survive without a spiritual dimension to their life are almost certain to be unhappy. Because they are really are victims, even if they may not know exactly of what. Revolution doesn’t come from outside, it comes from within.

This is what struck me today after my visit to the hospital yesterday, and again today, and all I can do is consider who I am and what I am, I can’t really be responsible for so many victims, or sensitive to them all,  I can barely keep track of them. I can’t feel all of this pain and conflict for years and survive.

So I will have to look inside of myself and decide what is really important to me. I think we all have a cause, an issue, that touches us deeply. Perhaps it is time to find it. A good friend says her issue is the treatment of women, and the election touched her deeply and personally and painfully.

We are all going to have to pick our issues now, and stay with them for a long time. The wolves are howling,  running free.

I have chosen for now to try to help the Syrian refugees trembling in America and trying to stay out of sight.

Their plight touches me the most right now. They are frightened and under siege.  I called a refugee resettlement group nearby and asked if I can help sponsor or assist a family. They are desperate for help, they care for the mothers and children our governors  – even the big tough governor of Texas – are terrified of, and refuse to help.

They are the new American lepers, the damned and despised, the enduring symbol and great test of compassion and empathy.  And they are silent mostly, too afraid even to speak out for themselves.

Everyone has their own issue, they are mine, I owe it to my grandmother, who was so brave and determined to get to America, the only country in the world she trusted to help  her.

I don’t need a safety pin for them, I need to pick up the phone and move and help them. I will do that today.

As for me, I do not see myself as a victim, and don’t wish to.  I will not speak so poorly of my life, and the words I use to describe it reflect and mirror it.

I have no grievances to offer,  I can’t compete for that attention.

I want to be responsible for my own life, but I also am privileged in so many ways that others are not. I remember that my family, immigrants driven from their homeland by persecution, often killed and tortured for their beliefs, saw themselves as victims. And truly, they were.

My grandmother hated nothing more than to be pitied, or seen as a victim. It was about the only thing that would make her furious with me. “Life is yours, it is a gift,” she said, “to live or not.”

Words matter. I don’t  yet have a label for me.

Grandma, if you are watching, cover your ears, close your ears and get your hanky out. We are all victims now.