President Trump

To say I was disappointed in the results of the election on November 8th would be a great understatement. I was an ardent supporter of Secretary Clinton and fully expected her to win the election. Although she may have had more votes, she lost badly in the Electoral College, which counts the most. We pretend to be a democracy where every vote counts. During this last election, in those states that mattered, the majority of the voters thought that Donald Trump, with all his baggage, would make a better president than Hillary Clinton, despite her wealth of experience. This is a decision I do not agree with, but the simple fact is that Donald Trump is President-elect and Hillary Clinton is not. I guess we just have to live with it, at least for the next four years.

I must say, I thought we had turned the corner as a country with the election of President Barack Obama. I believed that good White people, along with African Americans, Hispanics and other people of color represented the majority and we would never go back. I was wrong about that. I had expected to ride out my turn on a horse. Instead, I got a mule and a plow. My friend Dan said I did not even get a mule, but got a stubborn donkey. I guess he is right. In any case, there seems to be much work left to be done. Looks like I just have to get back to grinding - in the hope that I have something left to give that will make this world and this country better.

I wish President Trump the best. He is certainly inheriting a country in better shape than President Obama inherited when entering office. The country is not in economic peril. We have less people engaged in war. We have more people working. We have more people insured. Others in the world seem to have higher confidence in us as a country than they used to. I hope in an effort to “make America great again”, we will not undo the good things that have happened these past eight years. Does anyone desire to return to the George Bush years? I think even the Trump loyalists would have to think long and hard about this. My memory is not so short that I can’t recall the difficulty of those days.

The next four years can be important. We are going to have to live with the priorities of President Trump, and a Congress dominated by a party for which most of us did not vote. We have to watch while the Supreme Court is stacked with those who are opposed to some of the things that have made our life better. We have to listen to advocates in Congress that not only opposed Obamacare, but seemed to resist any initiative proposed by the President Obama that could have made the Constitution a document that had meaning to all. To have to listen to Ben Carson, Omarosa, Don King, Mike Tyson, the lying preacher, and the demented sisters is bad enough. But to think of Attorney General Sessions and Rudy Giuliani and the alt-right leading our country can be downright troubling. But we have been through difficult times before – and we endured.

I don’t know what the future holds. These next four years may be some of the greatest times our country has ever experienced. We may be poised for an economic miracle. We might enter a time of peace and prosperity. I would welcome that. But, if it were made on the backs of greater suffering of those who have the least, the price would have been too high. If it is made by exploiting people and using our strength to bully other countries, the gain will be too expensive. If we fail to listen to the voices of the downtrodden, the abused, the victims - we are a lesser society.