Whenever I am faced with emotional upsets that I have
trouble navigating, the ones that keep me up and night and have me talking to
myself in the car, I know it’s time to write it all down. In doing that, I’m
looking for a plan. What can I do to get
out from under this haze of darkness? The ascendance of Donald Trump to the
Presidency of the United States is one of those times for me. Unlike some of my more enlightened friends, I
was never comfortable or complacent about the whether there really was a possibility
of his actually winning because I live in Trump Country. I hear the absurdities every day in
disbelief.
I am so very disillusioned in the fabric of the middle in
America. What have we become that we
would let this horrible man represent all that is the best of us. He is not the best of us.
For years, I too have thought that maybe it would be a good
idea to send someone not only to the White House but also to both houses of
Congress that were not part of the politico; people that could bring fresh
thinking to the political landscape. I
had in mind powerful thinkers, successful business men, finance specialists,
inventors, non-profit leaders, philosophers of the social make up of the masses. Even people like Ross Perot, whom I didn’t
really like that much, after I did the research, I realized he was a good man
that really believed in what he was proposing.
I didn’t trust the majority of middle America to make a
decision for the greater good because I truly felt they would grab for the gossamer
cotton candy rather than wait for a more solid reward. For years I was frustrated with living in a
part of the country where word of mouth became the replacement of doing good
old fashioned homework. It was much
easier to just forgo reading the news and looking for the truth and just listen
to way of learning and only hear the pundits, the preacher and the politician
who spoke words they wanted to hear.
Not everyone is like this but there is a HUGE middle class contingent
busy with driving to the plant or office each day where they spend the day
thinking about what to do about the duck blind, the deer lease, the PTA
meeting, what to wear to the girls night out or what dish to bring to the pot
luck at the prayer meeting. There is a
LOT to deal with in everyday life and any kind of research past the local news
just isn’t necessary, it was being fed to them. They won’t admit to that, but
we have seen it in blaring color during this election. Laziness.
Too Lazy to know the truth and be aware and informed of the issues.
When these constituents hear someone speak out against the
issues their fearless leaders have said were important, instead of checking it
out, they just grab on to the key words and parrot them at these people that
they consider “left wing interlopers and bleeding hearts”. Behind the parroting, there is… blank space,
nothing, no facts or dates or times or numbers.
They don’t need those facts, because the people that are supposed to
know about that already did the research for them and that is “good enough”. They are also fine with using those catch
phrases to support their borrowed views and then go back to their everyday life
with the assumption that their fearless leaders are there protecting the home
front. These are the people that the
Democratic party got wrong and got it wrong badly.
In my studies of history, when an army suffers a great
defeat, they re-group and pull back but not only to analyse the next battle,
but also what they can do at this very moment to position themselves so that
their next battle is shored up and ready to succeed. This is what needs to be done now. Action is the only thing that will make this
horrible situation better.
