In the wee small hours of the morning…
Tonight, like most of my friends, I settled in my overstuffed chair with a pizza and a large glass of wine to witness the first woman in our history crash through the last and the highest glass ceiling of them all, and claim the top prize of them all—the Presidency of the United States. It was not to be.
I haven’t been so shocked since the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell. At 9 PM the election map was starting to fill in just as predicted. But by 10 PM the pattern slowed down to a crawl. The states that virtually all the prognosticators had predicted would go to Hillary Clinton refused to follow their scripts. First it was Florida, then North Carolina, and then Ohio. They were soon followed by Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania as each froze in place before inching away from Hillary and toward Trump. The silence was deafening.
By 2:15 AM the impossible pathway laid out for Trump had been completely bridged and it was replaced by a new impossible pathway Clinton rising ever higher before her. In this age of refinements in random sampling, and computers with pattern recognition, and calls, and more calls, it seems that every one of the experts got caught with their hard drives locked down around their buttocks. Not only did Hillary come up short, but so did most of the Democrats running for the Senate and the House. It was a clean sweep. The last gasp of sanity will be heard when Trump trots out a member of his dysfunctional family to fill the empty seat on the Supreme Court.
It’s another “mission accomplished”—without a play book, without an organization, and without a clue. Well, at least he did it the American way.
I am now going to bed. By morning maybe we’ll all find out that this was just a nightmare, a bad joke the networks cooked up to prepare us for the coming television season. Yeah, that’s probably it. Lights out. It was probably the pizza...
Rebecca
Love ya!
Jane
As of this morning, Hillary retained a very narrow lead in the popular vote. But, it is ever more clear, as Trump has clearly stated, the election process is "rigged" to favor rural over city and white over ethnic. Conservative control over congressional districts and voting precincts by gerrymandering continues the legacy in this election similar to what happened to Al Gore when he had the popular vote over George Bush.
There is a continued movement of people to the cities. From the maps I saw last night, the cities were progressive and the countryside regressive. People in the countryside are hard pressed to keep their property from corporations and they fear the cities and the people that live in them. The result of this election is an underestimation of fear that so many feel faced with problems that they find insurmountable because they lack any tangible ability to solve them. It is a poor attitude to have, but it is the fact. So many are pulling back and isolating themselves from problems of their own causing. We have a hard time getting over old beliefs like women being second-class citizens and relegated to the home and child rearing.
Fortunately, regressive ideas that the conservatives hold are dying and they know it. Unfortunately, during this administration the Supreme Court may be filled with conservative justices who will have life appointments and keep our country legally strangled far into the future.
Like I've written many times, we have survived the bad Presidents before and we will survive this one. It's up to Donald Trump now to live up to his promise this morning to be a president for, "all of the people."
Ron