Neighbor to neighbor I shared my deepest concern about a Trump presidency. What about those who seem emboldened by these kinds of comments? I asked. What of the uptick we’ve already seen in racist, sexist, homophobic and Islamophobic incidents since election night? How do we fix this?

“The ugliness is a good thing,” he answered. “If I’m going to work on a basement, the first thing you do is expose what’s down there, the mold, the spiders. You need to see it before you can clear it out.”

Okaaay, I think. But then you stomp on them, right?

The ugliness has been there all along, he continued, and it is better that we see it. “I’d rather have a guy fly a swastika right outside his house so I know that’s how he thinks rather than him thinking that way but hiding it,” he said. “I want to know who the jerk is who’s flying that thing.”

My stomach lurched, and for a moment I thought I might wretch up the lovely cup of Keurig coffee Chris’ mother had brought me. But again I didn’t push back. I didn’t tell him that my relatives had fled that swastika, and what he saw as some sort of “let the jerks be jerks,” I saw as normalizing hate and encouraging others to do the same.