Protest in Richmond (photo by John P. Flannery)
There’s a Chinese curse – “may you live in interesting times.”
We are living in “interesting times,” in fact, in quite challenging times.
We worked our heart and soul to elect the first woman president of the United States.
That’s both interesting and “historic.”
Virginia wanted Hillary.
The nation needed her.
According to the popular vote, the nation preferred that Hillary Clinton be our next president.
But the electoral college is the constitutional measure of such things, and thus we shall have a failed casino operator, Donald Trump, as our President – a crass, disrespectful, cursing, hate-filled, lying, intolerant bully, who pretends to know much about everything, while having little experience at much of anything having to do with public policy and governance.
This man ran down our nation for the last year, picking fights, pushing people around, promising somehow, by these tactics, that he’d make America great again.
Trump doesn’t know what makes this nation great.
It is that we conceived of ourselves as a nation as one united – one from many.
This “got-your-back” promise of unity has been our nation’s North Star, what we have fought to perfect from the very beginning.
We have struggled in fits and starts, not without pain, not without blood and suffering, indeed, not without a civil war, not without women being jailed and tortured for demanding the right to vote.
The French made a gift to this still young nation of a tall statue, a maiden who stands with a flaming torch of liberty uplifted high for the whole world to see, beckoning the suffering masses to our shores to find freedom. We’re not going to go back on that promise, are we?
What could be a more grievous violation of what makes us great, than to divide our nation.
President Lincoln said – “a House divided cannot stand.”
More than any time in my life since the 60s, have we seen such intolerance by a presidential candidate based on a person’s skin color, gender, religion, nation of origin, and sexual orientation.
Mature citizens who are hardly politically obsessive, who are just plain folk, cannot sleep. Perhaps you couldn’t either.
Children cry at home and in class because they know and they fear we are re-defining our nation’s social contract; they are being counseled.
Protesters take to the streets, the vice-president elect is booed at a theater in New York, and the President rebuffs an actor’s plea for reassurance, signaling the President elect’s low threshold to strike out at others.
We are also hard-pressed in the history of American politics to find anything like Russia’s intrusion into our presidential election.
FBI Director Comey irreparably intruded into this election in the final days of the campaign.
These compromises of our electoral process eclipses Nixon’s dirty tricks in 1972. Continue reading
