I figured “and now we mourn” was a fitting title to follow my last entry, “and now we wait.” I am truly emotionally devastated by the election results. I am still struggling to decide what I am thinking of as the “ratio of my devastation,” meaning, how much of my devastation is because I am saddened by the outcome, and how much is because it was not at all what I expected. I think it’s about half and half, but both are quite upsetting to me. If you know me, you know that the unpredictable makes me uncomfortable and I strive to understand the world and wish it were fair, and I am shaken when the fundamental understanding of things comes into question. The latter seems to come with unpredictable responses from me (which is unsettling). I am often really excited when what we thought was true isn’t, but apparently in some cases, this terrifies me. I am clearly a mixed bag.
Category: Donald Trump
Are we spoiled?
I spend a fair amount of time on FaceBook, and I keep a pretty diverse group of friends, so I get to hear lots of different perspectives. I have quite a few friends who are just not happy with the election. They don’t like the choices, and they think the whole thing is messed up. When people say they have to vote for the lesser of two evils, I have a tendency to feel like this says more about the nomination from the party that person is more likely to vote for, than it says about both candidates (read more here), but there are nevertheless plenty of people who just despise both choices, especially this year. When I think about the people who aren’t happy, some of them dislike the candidates as people (Hillary is a crook, Trump is a pig, etc), but I’ve been friends, at least on FaceBook, with others for long enough that I get the sense they will never be happy, with any candidate, unless that candidate fits their hopes/dreams/values/desires perfectly. It makes me wonder if we’re expecting a bit too much…maybe spoiled by modern society.
Think there are no good choices in the election? Does that say more about ‘your’ candidate than it does about the election in general? Probably.
My Facebook feed is full of people who are dissatisfied with the election options. Meme after meme pokes fun at the candidates and the options the voters have this presidential election cycle. “I don’t think America should elect any president in 2016. We need to be single for a few years and find ourselves,” is one that I find amusing.
I find this one is a bit more offensive, but I get the point.
Here’s my problem with all of this: It doesn’t matter what anybody thinks of BOTH candidates. What matters the most is what each person thinks of one of them. That is ALL that matters.
Will we have our fourth “illegitimate” president in a row?
I’m not a historian, and I don’t know one well enough to ask, but it seems like the illegitimate president is a modern trend. Even if we’ve had one or two before, my guess is that we haven’t had three, could be four, in a row. What do I mean by an illegitimate president? A president who a large swath of Americans reject as the legitimate president because of one thing or another. Clinton, failed to get a majority of the vote. Bush, had a presidency that was decided by a Supreme Court case (which, in my non-legal expert opinion, was decided against the ideology of every single Justice on the bench). Obama’s citizenship, or fraudulent citizenship, made him illegitimate, and now, the election is rigged, so if Clinton wins, her presidency will have the illegitimate label also. Let’s look at each of these in a rational manner.
Continue reading “Will we have our fourth “illegitimate” president in a row?”
Demonizing Hillary
My wife has enormous influence on me. I listen to whatever she says, and am often convinced to change my view, at least slightly, because of something she said. On the twentieth anniversary of our marriage (today, August 3rd, 2016), it is, therefore, appropriate to write a brief note about a recent change in my thinking about the 2016 elections.
This change is a good one; good in the sense that it lets me live my life feeling less disgust for other people. That makes me happy, because feeling disgust for anything is not pleasant in any way. So what changed? My view of Trump voters.
The Trump Trainwreck
I’m not ready (yet) to think it’s all over, or that Trump has no chance whatsoever of winning; a lot can happen between now and November. But, some things that many of us saw before are becoming crystallized, and none of this is good for Mr. Trump.
Hitting Bregma 