Post- Mortem

 

~Paraphrasing Ali Velshi~ The most powerful person in America is not Donald J. Trump, it's you.

 These are tough times for progressives and democrats in America. There was a red wave this past week, and everyone in democratic circles are scratching their heads and trying to figure out why. Even the winners seemed a little shell shocked by the scope and magnitude of the outcome. 

I'm not, and if you are a student of American history, or if you pay attention to the psyche and mindset of the white majority population in America, you would not be either.

Frist, let's stop with all the talk about white working class and economic angst, and democrats not addressing their concerns. (James Carville, and Bernie Sanders, old white men themselves, will never get it.)  If you gave a lot of these white working class voters a million dollars, and in order to keep it they would have to have voted for Harris, your money would have been safe. They still wouldn't have done it. It has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with identity. Kamala's race and gender made it damn near impossible for her to win. Her opponent, at times, was acting like he wanted to lose, and he still beat her by a country mile. Performing fellatio on a mike at a rally, declaring that immigrants are eating cats and dogs, threatening political violence against his enemies, is not a winning message, but it worked for trump because it was never about the message. It was always about the people who are running. Plain and simple. 

As Americans we never like to hear this, because we like to think of ourselves as somehow being above bigotry and ignorance. We believe that this experiment in democracy is complete, and that we have created a perfect union. We have not. Take a look around you. Look who we are sending back to Washington. Not only Trump, but all of the slimy loathsome self-serving politicians who thrive in an environment of hate and division. Trump is the face of it, and he made it cool to hate without having to act like we are the haters. We channeled our hate through him. That's who we elected as our next president. A man who has spent his entire political life dividing people, and demonizing those who look different and who he perceives as being less than. This includes not only ordinary citizens, but military service members as well. The people who served in his administration and know him best told us who he is, and we still chose not to believe them. Why?  Because deep down most Americans ( I can say most now based on  the election results) know that we are no different than he is.

 I feel bad for black women who truly thought they had allies with white women. That their solidarity of sisterhood, united in their fight for reproductive freedoms, would be enough to beat the tyrant in waiting at the ballot box. It was not. At the end of the day, whiteness and fear of others comes first. Trump knew this, and he used it to his political advantage. 

A few years back a white women who worked for me told me that she might be coming into work a little later for a few days. She told me that she had to renew her parking privileges at a garage that was much closer to our place of work. And until then, she would have to rely on someone else to drop her off.  In the meantime, she couldn't park in a garage that was farther away. She just couldn't take the chance of walking a longer distance to work. Center City, Philadelphia (by all accounts the safest part of anywhere in the city), was just too dangerous for her. 

I thought about my former co-worker a lot during this election cycle. When those scary dark and ominous trump commercials of young brown men were running over and over, I knew that they would have their intended outcomes. Talking heads on cable television and political pundits were saying that there is no way Americans (especially suburban white women) would embrace Trump's message of fear and division. They were wrong. Harris and her message of joy, hope, and not going back, was never going to work with a majority population, whose fears and prejudices were a much more motivating factor in how they voted. 

I will let Elie Mystal's quotes close this post.

"America deserves everything is about to get. We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better work for not just ourselves, but our sisters and brothers in at lease some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid...America did this. America, through the process of a free and fair election, demanded this.. And America, as a collective, deserves to get what it wants."

These next four years will be interesting. And I will be hear for it. Hopefully, so will you. 

     

  

Three days and counting.

 

" I live in a crazy time" ~Anne Frank~ 

Just three days to go, and Americans are bracing for the election of a lifetime. It's hard to believe that Donald J. Trump could be elected as the 47th President of the Unites States, but here we are. 

I am not going to get into the litany of reasons why this man, a convicted felon, should never be seen anywhere near the White House again, I think that it is all well documented. (He should have been prosecuted and sitting in federal prison for what he did on January 6th.)  Although, I must say, that he is adding to that list every day.  The 1939 Nazi style convention in Madison Square Garden. The relentless attack on immigrants and people who are different. Openly bragging about his white skin, and mocking Kamala's ethnicity. Calling for the execution of Liz Cheney by firing squad, threatening mass deportations of people he doesn't think should be here.  Finally, and most importantly, not one single policy position that will make your life or mine any better. Not one. Oh wait...yeah, tariffs.

I am not going to  play pollster or prognosticator and dare try to guess the results on Tuesday. I'm bad at this stuff. I never thought that America would elect a black man with a funny name, and they did it. Twice. I never thought that someone like Donald Trump could be elected president, and he was.  So I honestly don't know what to expect. My gut instinct tells me that America will never elevate a black woman to the highest office in the land.  Heck, they wouldn't elect a white woman who was also more qualified for the position than Trump. The sexism is that strong. Throw race in the mix and you see where I am going. Most people who are voting for the felon will not be able to articulate a reason why. They will make all kinds of excuses for voting for him, and not one of them will make sense. They just know that Kamala is bad.  

I give Trump credit, he figured it out. His us against them fear mongering campaign is working because Americans are afraid of change.  The logic goes like this:  Trump might be a terrible human being who plays on our worst instincts, but at least he looks like us. He can't be that bad. He will protect us from the brown scary people who are trying to take our country from us. There is nothing he can say or do that will change that thinking in the minds of fifty percent of the voters in America. That man he shot on 5th Avenue had it coming.  When he says that he would like to be a dictator for life like his pals, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un,  the Wall Street Journal declares that he does not have the attention span to carry out his agenda, and then endorses him.  Republican politicians are on cable news shows every night translating what he meant when he literally said something else.  

This collective form of cognitive dissonance has infected a majority of white Americans.  Mr. Trump is hoping that it will be enough to place him in the most powerful position on earth once again.  He will be free to carry out project 2025, and play dictator while the sycophants around him feed his ego. Republicans will most likely control both houses, and the majority of the Supreme Court is made up of  obsequious hand-picked loyalist who have abandoned the rule of law for political reasons. 

This is what we might be facing come the morning of November 6th.  

Just know that whatever happens, I will be here. Maybe not as much as I would like, but I will still be posting when I can.    

Thank you field hands for always checking in with your comments and insights. 

Vote!