Monday, November 07, 2016

Be brave --- it's almost over (for this time)

Well, it's been an interesting campaign --- and I'm glad that it's almost over. We've all learned a lot about each other during the last few months (in Iowa, a caucus state, the last few years) --- some of it interesting, some of it infuriating, all of it useful when charting a course forward.

My cousin, Eleanor, on Sunday shared a 2012 Facebook Election Day post of hers that sums up the way I feel, too: "To my Facebook friends of both political parties, for 50 years (yes 50 years) I have had the privilege of going to the polls and voting for the president of the United States. I have seen your posts, looked at your posters, and read your slogans. They have not done anything to sway my vote, but they have made me extremely tired. Hope my candidate wins today. That would be wonderful. If that doesn't happen, which in the past has occurred, tomorrow I will go on with my life, respect the person who won --- they will be our president --- and hope we can work together. Hope you can do the same."

Personally, nothing has happened to alter my conviction that Hillary Clinton is the candidate best equipped to lead our country. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof put it over the weekend, "Fundamentally, Hillary Clinton is a morally serious person whose passion for four decades has been to use politics to create a more just society. That's her real conviction."

Nothing has happened to alter my conviction that Donald Trump, while by no means the devil incarnate, is a man of massive ego but modest intelligence and talent who has disabled his moral compass.

The campaign has bolstered a conviction that we're experiencing the death throes of poisonous myths and institutions built into the fabric of America --- white supremacy, male supremacy, heterosexual supremacy and primitive, tribal religiosity.

Iowa, for all sorts of reasons, is one of those places where these myths will die hard --- so it's not surprising that Trump is leading in the polls here.

Whoever wins, I'm going to miss having the Obamas in the White House --- a president whom I expect history will judge as one of the best and his beautiful, gracious family, reflections of the best in American values.

Whoever wins, even if I'm not happy with the results, will be my president, too --- until the next election.

No comments: