On The President Elect

I'm feeling slightly better this morning. Refocused, I suppose you could say. Willing to be, in some ways, cooperative.

There is a caveat, of course.

A lot of people are calling for the people that had been targeted by Donald Trump's rhetoric to "just shut the fuck up already, you dramatic whiny liberals, you're embarrassing yourselves." Some of those people also mention that conservatives are being ingracious winners- to show that they themselves are not partisan, and so above the fray of the conversation. Thank you, to those of you that truly hold the moral high ground and can see that EVERYONE is acting like babies. Society would be lost if not for your very selective concepts of what is truly wrong with everyone.

But, because I know you are reasonable, as you have made it clear in your lengthy rants calling for others to man up and face the day, I'm going to try to explain to you why this feels different to me.

First of all- you've been saying that it feels very familiar. That we must remember a time when people thought it was ludicrous that we had elected George W. Bush into power, and if we think about it, he wasn't that bad. Sure, we wound up in an ill advised war that kind of fueled turmoil in the middle east and made the rest of the world hate us, but other than that and the recession, things were all right. And yeah, he was a strong man about the 9/11 attacks, but he tried to bring the country together, or whatever. I concede that George W. Bush did not seem to be inherently evil. He may have come across as bumbling, and have a pretty divisive legacy, but I don't think he went into the oval office wanting to hurt anyone. To his credit, he never explicitly said that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, that Mexicans were rapists, that he could grab women by the pussy, that Megan Kelly was a bitch because she was on her period, or called for the arrest of Al Gore for some reason that the majority of people agree does not warrant arrest. He might have thought any one of those things, all of them even, but he never said them aloud. He did not drive his campaign on the idea that there was an "other" in American society that was bringing "us" (white people) down. Maybe he would have eventually become embroiled in policy making if 9/11 hadn't happened and we "had to start" protecting ourselves from terrorists and that became the focus of his presidency. Maybe. But we KNOW that Donald Trump has been endorsed by the KKK. We KNOW he called Mexicans rapists, it was recorded. We KNOW he has sexually assaulted women as an abuse of his power and celebrity because that was also accidentally recorded. Robert Durst might be pleading not-guilty, but, dude, we KNOW he did it. And we know what Donald Trump has done and said this entire time and they are very different things from what George W. Bush said when he was elected, from what I remember. Then we were worried we'd elected an idiot- not a malicious Twitter-war monger. There's a difference.

Now, as to why that difference matters. Because it's all just words, so why get so upset? No one is going to do anything to anyone, that would be crazy. There's a system of checks and balances. You're blowing things out of proportion if you think that this is going to get all "Fascist Germany" up in herr.

Well, yeah, sure, it might just be words. But from what we remember of fascism, that whole movement kind of started because people were upset that they were no longer able to live as they did before. And a finger was pointed, and the government was blamed, and more fingers went out to people that were accused of helping the government to establish a system that was hurting the people that were angry. And that sounds eerily familiar right now. I am sure there were hopeful people back then, even among the people who were being accused of ruining the country, that there were systems in place that would protect them. That it was all just words. That humanity is inherently decent and there is no way things would come to real violence. That they were over-reacting. So, now, I do believe that humanity is inherently decent, but I don't know if things will not grow into violence. I don't know if people will not feel emboldened to hurt others in a reactionary way. I don't know if people that look more like those people, and less like me, will then sit by and watch. I hope not, sure, but historically, that doesn't seem to be the case. I think most people don't really think a genocide is going to happen, sadly there are people who think genocide never occurs, but we know it is an option, and usually it starts with words.

And there is a system of checks and balances. That is now all in one unified party. That was the idea. That there would be a unified party so that things could get done. And the things that were promised were tax breaks for the rich, a wall to keep out the others, bringing back dead and inefficient industry, making sure that others couldn't fly in to attack us, and then some things- which I suppose, may be good.

The point is, we are not scared because we lost. We're scared because we were taught things in history about what happens when someone runs a campaign of anger and divisive rhetoric. We do want to work with everyone to keep things great, because in the last 8 years America had made some really great strides at rebuilding it's image and was reaching out to people at home. It wasn't fast enough, it seems, but the President doesn't really have that much power. So why then, are we all upset? Because a unified party does. And this is a unified party under an umbrella of fear mongering and hate. And we've seen how that plays out before, and it seems that there are far few people's attics and basements to hide in than we assumed before the results came in.

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