So many thoughts this morning. Figured I'd post a few here and then I'll probably be scarce for a little while. This was an exhausting election, and I'm planning to focus on helping my immediate family have a fairly normal holiday season. My wife and daughter in particular are devastated this morning.
1. I was completely and totally wrong about how this election would go. I really thought America was just asking for a sane, competent alternative to the insanity of Trump and the incompetence of Biden. That's exactly what the Dems offered up. But America apparently prefers chaos and disruption to stability, emotional overreaction to logic and facts, malignant immorality and divisiveness to a message of unity. So be it. There are no excuses for this one. Trump is a fully known entity, and yet people chose him. Trump would have won easily even without the democracy-distorting Electoral College. Pretty much every state, group, and demographic other than college-educated women appears to have shifted heavily to Trump. This is clearly what America wants. Which means it's not the America I thought it was. But again, so be it.
2. I've been thinking about the pattern of wild swings and anti-incumbent sentiment we're seeing not just in the US, but also in comparable democracies like the UK and France. I really do wonder if, in some ways, this is the modern response to a world that no longer has massive global wars every few decades. Those wars, which basically defined Western history for centuries, had the effect of disrupting societies and changing power dynamics in radical and unpredictable ways. I wonder if the human spirit is just wired to want disruption and chaos after a certain amount of time, and in the absence of global wars, we're seeing that play out through the political process. If that's the case, I guess this is better than another world war. But it's very hard to understand the mindset of someone who would play Russian roulette with the country in the wild and almost certainly misguided hope that their personal situation might improve a tiny bit. How selfish and short-sighted does that person have to be?
3. I hope we can all find it in ourselves to keep helping the most marginalized people and groups in our community, even if the exit polling suggests many of them either voted for the pain that's likely coming their way, or just didn't vote at all. I have very little interest in continuing to use federal resources to help those people who are not disadvantaged and continue to support Trump, even though those tend to be the biggest "takers" in our current system. But the marginalized among us will need help regardless of what they thought about this election, and while it's hard to care much right now, I hope we can continue to be there for them as the federal government backs away.
