Usually, I get ample proof from my friends and followers that I’m preaching’ to the choir. But lately I’ve also received a few of precisely the kind of responses I might have expected from some of Trump’s supporters. Comments like “You lost; get over it!,” “I’m sick and tired of all you cry-babies bitching and moaning!,” and “It’s your turn to be a loser, college boy; why don’t you just man-up?” And those are the polite ones.
Really! We’re the cry-babies?
AN INVISIBLE HOLE
So…a big chunk (not a majority, mind you) of the American electorate apparently has perceived themselves as oppressed, muzzled, getting short-changed in their share of the American Dream. This despite ample proof that, overall, the quality of life in this country has never, ever, been better.
After the Obama administration’s helped dig us out of the deep hole dug during the “Dubya” years, we now enjoy the best job growth in 18 yrs.; strongest dollar in three decades; gas a bit over $2 per gallon; unemployment cut in half; the annual Bush deficit cut by two-thirds; recovered housing market; growing exports; Dow Jones average tripled and surging once again…
What am I missing?
What they'd really lost...was their ability to control.
They say they’d lost their voice, their power. And even some more charitable liberals than I believe them. But I’m going to call them on it. What they’d really lost during those eight hard-fought years of progressives’ gains was not the American dream. It was their ability to control.
And it was not simply control over themselves and their own fortunes they so lusted for. It was authority—control over land, people not like them, other countries, ideas they see as threatening to their rather narrow quasi-religious ideology. That’s what this election was really about.
LILY-WHITE CLONES
For the last eight years, while we progressives have been thinking positively, constructively, of ways to make the world a better place—connecting people; creating opportunity; trying, against the best-funded, most powerful lobbying efforts in history, to preserve a natural environment we’re proud to pass on to our kids and grandkids—conservative ideologues have put all their eggs into one big basket of NO!
He held out a few cheap promises like a candy bar
to a health nut's child.
By
their own admission, their one and only goal during the eight-year
administration of one of the most intelligent, visionary,
positive-minded, decent presidents in history has been to derail
absolutely anything he’s proposed. Not exert their own version of
leadership, not offer constructive alternatives, not paint a picture of a
better America; no, just stifle every glimmer of hope for a kinder,
gentler nation.What is it you want, folks? Federal hands off of public lands so you can gouge out more mineral wealth on the cheap, wallow in more ATV mud holes and build more rifle ranges? A sub-prime mortgage on the environment we leave our grandchildren in return for a few jobs in unsustainable industries? Your own little nation of God-fearin,’ lily-white clones?
THE PRICE OF A CANDY BAR
Well, looks like your political temper tantrum has, against all odds, gotten you the attention you so craved. And now the rest of us must live, for at least the next four years, with the consequences: a president who—at precisely the moment in history when we most need a leader with a constructive vision—has already proven himself an utterly ill-prepared, emotionally unstable, uncurious, vulgar, pompous, self-serving narcissist.
And
none of this charlatan’s destruction should come as any surprise to
those who ganged up—apparently with a little help from one of our
nation’s arch enemies—to push him into office. He held out a few cheap
promises like a candy bar to a health nut’s child. And you totally
reached out and grabbed it.Congratulations, you poor, self-styled victims, your little hissy fit worked big-time. You little brats set the house afire over a fucking Milky Way.
“We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.” ~ NEAL GABLER
