My alarm clock is set to play the news. I woke up on Wednesday morning to the shocking fact that Donald Trump had won the presidency. I wanted to roll over and go back to sleep and try waking up again. That morning was awful.
This outcome is an absolute joke. I am so disappointed in the people around me. I still don’t understand the explanations that pundits and the news media have offered for their own failure to predict this. Maybe the problem is inherent in trying to explain the kind of irrational backlash movement that Trump represents.
I don’t think the Trump debacle will affect my life much in the next four years. Other people will be affected, though. I haven’t forgotten about the 500 000 dead Iraqis George W. Bush and the neocons are responsible for. I haven’t forgotten the face of Terri Schiavo.
I will not despair. Four years from now a rising star in the Democratic party will be elected and we will see this for what it was: a paroxysm in the national temper, a flare-up, a fluke. The next president might even be Minnesota’s own Amy Klobuchar.
In the meantime I will take care of those around me. I will resolve to avoid sinking into the politics of grievance that motivated so many voters this year, on both sides. I will continue feathering the liberal enclaves where I choose to live. Finally, I’ll try to be more skeptical of the conventional wisdom, so that I will never again have such a bad morning as I did this week.
pseudoisaac 