One of the few advantages of getting older is you gain more perspective on life. Or so they say. We older folks like to call it wisdom. My supposed wisdom was challenged when my daughter emailed me in the early morning hours after Donald Trump, the 70-year old developer with not an iota of government experience but with a surplus of misogyny, sexism, racism and nativism, was elected the 45th President of the United States, thwarting the former Senator, First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from becoming the nation’s first female commander in chief.
“This is all such a colossal disaster. I am really sad and scared about all this…I don’t know how to explain to my boys how a man like him can come to be our democratically elected in a country like this.”
She didn’t know how to explain it to her “boys”—my grandsons—and I didn’t know how to explain it to my two daughters—Jill and Michele. I didn’t want to blow it away with “ it will get better” or “this too will pass” or throw oil on the fire of anxiety by saying “ it’s horrible; I too am fearful.”
Having hardly slept a wink that night—a night when our country took a U-Turn– I was still tired when I spotted her early morning email on my phone. I wasn’t ready to respond; my eyes ached, my brain was as clear as if I were peering through a ball of cotton, and my heart ached.
But I didn’t want to delay in responding; there was such a tone of despair in her email.
Her email was no different:
“I am just numb. It is hard to believe that so many Americans are so ignorant and so willing to give this important job to someone so blatantly unprepared and mentally unbalanced. It is difficult to explain to the kids.”
So I pecked away on my iPad as best I could with a response as I lay in bed:
I was hoping for a woman president for my wife , two daughters and my grand children. How neat it would be to have witnessed a Catholic, black and woman president in my lifetime after more than a century and a half of white male Protestants. But we got stuffed at the goal line.
Sad and disappointed, yes. But don’t be scared. America is bigger than anyone person. And Trump will soon find that out.
You will find the right words for the boys, who understand defeat and disappointment from all the sports they play. When I look at history I believe Martin Luther King said it best. The arc of moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
That’s the best I can do….
A few days have since passed, and I actually feel worse than the morning after. Yes, I accept the result and fully understand why it happened: First, every action has an equal and opposite reaction (Newton’s Third Law). In short, after having a black president and seeing a sea change in cultural and legal norms with gays, gay marriage, and abortion, the body politic retreated. It’s not the first time and won’t be the last.
Good column. A friend of mine the other day described it as a “correction”; just as the stock market sometimes needs to correct itself when it shoots up too high, our politics go through the same fluctuations. Maybe the way we valued ultra-liberal social issues shot up to far too fast for the market (the populace as a whole) and now there needs to be a leveling out, hopefully to allow the rest of the country to catch up (hopefully NOT to turn things backward).
Good history lesson, and yes, we are a work in progress. I too survived the “changes” you described but I don’t remember a time when the divide was as deep and fractious as it is today. The wild card that exists today is the media. As long as we take every headline as gospel (as long as it fuels our rage), we will never be able to have the critical conversations we need to have to move forward. Until we can look at both sides of the divide, and I assure you that they are very real on both sides, I don’t think we can move forward.