Choosing Day

I didn’t want to add to the noise.  There was so much of it.  Wall to wall.  Twenty-four seven.  Facebook, Twitter, cable “news”, “false news”, TV, newspapers, blogs and who knows where else.  The noise was deafening and nauseating.  And when I started this blog, I promised not to turn it into a political rant page.  In the last five hundred days, it has been difficult to clear my mind because of the onslaught of noise.  This campaign made posting stories in my usual style seem trivial.  The election hasn’t quelled the racket.

The election is over.  No candidate got most of the votes.  Donald Trump has become our President-elect.  In the hope that my grandsons will someday read these blog posts, I have to say something about such a contentious political event.  If you can’t stand the additional noise, stop here.  I understand.

When I started to write this blog post, it was Tuesday, exactly a week after a hundred-twenty-seven million votes were counted.  The data were:  Trump’s 290 exceeded Clinton’s 232 Electoral College votes (final count: Trump 306, Clinton 232).  Clinton had accumulated almost 800,000 more individual votes than Trump (now the number is closer to three million).  53% of Americans who voted, voted for a candidate who didn’t win.  About ninety million eligible voters didn’t vote. 

On Friday after the election, I received an email from a very close friend.  I’d say we’re buddies.  He expressed concern for me as he opened his email with “I know you’re hurting.”  This was an absolute first for me.  I’ve cared about elections my entire life but this is the first time I received the kind of sympathy that usually accompanies the death of a family member or close friend.  There have been other elections where I was indeed hurting: Bobby Kennedy – 1968, Jerry Litton – 1976; and Mel Carnahan – 2000.  All of them died during their campaigns and all of them embodied the sort of character I’ve come to admire in people who view politics as a calling to public service.  None of the presidential candidates inspired me this time.  The election results left me somewhat bewildered but not hurting.

As to the candidates, I wanted to hear or be able to discern their answers to some rather simple questions.  When you look at a group of Americans, who do you see?  Who do you hear?  Who do you listen to?  What do you believe and what facts support your beliefs?  Where do you stand and what do you value enough that you would sacrifice your life – or the life of your child?  What do you expect?  Who do you respect?  What is the truth?  Is truth a matter of fact or opinion?  The 500 days of the campaign left all of those questions spinning in the darkness of obfuscation and misinformation.  Lying has been a human trait for all of recorded history but this is the first time when lying completely drowned personal responsibility and integrity from the discourse. 

President-elect Trump taught us that words do not matter.  If words spoken, written or tweeted harm someone, tell or propagate lies, or postulate a position, Mr. Trump or his handlers blame the listener who is at fault for assuming the ordinary definitions of the words used in such utterances.  If he said it, it is true only until he says something different or does something that conflicts with his prior words.  Prior statements are claimed to be jokes, described as overt rebellion against political correctness or dismissed as never said or not what he believes.  His apologists blame listeners for not understanding that what he said didn’t reflect what was in his heart.  Thousands of examples are available to anyone who wants to look at the record with a modicum of objectivity.

However, Trump was right.  He had correctly assessed the issues that motivated voters who felt forgotten.  Eligible voters who may not have voted for a long time because they believed, probably correctly, that they were invisible to politicians and major political parties.  Trump was also right about the impact of augmenting the political power of folks who felt invisible with people whose dominant beliefs were racist, misogynistic, or fascist.  For decades the power structures, political and governmental, treated too many people as invisible.  The Electoral College, an artifact of power brokering during the time slavery was legal, helps perpetuate the system where millions of voters remain invisible until Choosing Day.

Walt Witman in his poem, Election Day, November, 1884, captures the event:

“--This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name –

the still small voice vibrating – America’s choosing day, …

“The final ballot-shower from East to West – the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling …

“These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails. “

So, it seems that America’s choosing day is a giant wind, a ballot shower, gathering  strength every four years.  The gusting wind of Americans casting their ballots, is the same wind that blew Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln into office.  Unsaid, but of course, it has blown others far less worthy into that same shore.  In 2016 that wind filled the sails of Donald Trump.  Hope yearns for Mr. Trump to emulate Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln.  All Americans are called to work toward guiding him along and honoring the paths they walked. 

We now sit on the cusp of inauguration day.  Mr. Trump will thenceforth be called Mr. President.  His every word will be parsed and analyzed.  Words matter.  I’m not hurting but I am worried.  I will continue to worry until Mr. Trump respects the words he says enough to be willing to live by their plain, untwisted meaning. 

When words are allowed to have no meaning, all human values are lost.  We citizens must not allow spin to replace meaning, fabrications to replace facts or histrionics to replace history.  If we do, this American experiment in self-governance will have failed.

--td