Post Election Post

Today has been a passage through the stages of grief, although the anger stage seems to keep circling back.

I went to work and did what I had too. Well, after my boss brought me out of my closed door and tried to cheer me up, finally getting there when he asked, "What do I have to do? Wrestle you to the floor and tickle you?"

He gave some optimistic perspective that this was a populist election, not a new, conservative President. He is right that this is a problem of the elites and populism can help us reform that. Of course, no one, probably not even the donald knows what he is going to do. Talk of Sarah Palin as Secretary of the Interior is enough to gag me without a spoon.

The Washington cesspool does need some cleaning up. But I see it more as the fancy-pants lawyers and lobbyists of K Street than the wonderful family  in the White House, completely free of scandal. And yes, the Democratic Party blew it big time. At least we won't have Bill Clinton to kick around anymore. Yes, the Democrats need some serious reforming. The Republicans, a lost cause. Let them attempt to govern in their bubble of ignorance, prejudice, and fear for a couple years and see how it goes.

Our Nation and Constitution will survive. As I've said before, the checks and balances between the branches of government are so powerful that they even function when one party controls all three branches. Have fun stormin' the castle, boys!

My son sent out a post early this morning that has a lot of wisdom supposedly from Michael Moore. It's worth sharing here:

Morning After To-Do List:

1. Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.

2. Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." They will pull more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off.

3. Any Democratic member of Congress who didn't wake up this morning ready to fight, resist and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years must step out of the way and let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness and the madness that's about to begin.

4. Everyone must stop saying they are "stunned" and "shocked". What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all "You're fired!" Trump's victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that.

5. You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: "HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE!" The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period. Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don't. The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he's president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we'll continue to have presidents we didn't elect and didn't want. You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there's climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don't want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the "liberal" position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above).

Let's try to get this all done by noon today. -- Michael Moore

It's a little after noon but I am coming to myself. He is right. There is more of us than there is of them. Hillary won the popular vote. And Trump only won through one of the last vestiges of states rights, the Electoral College. Wyoming got three whole votes. They are more heavily weighted than the votes of California.

Here's the early morning thoughts of Anonymous D:

I just don't know what to say. You really wonder about American institutions, about the American people.  It would be easy, looking back at this with the perspective of history, to say that America got the leadership in this period, it deserved.  It's not enjoyable to be the generation deserving of it. Mormons, it seems, turned out in droves for Trump. So much for the Mormon self-righteousness of choosing a third way. In the end we showed that party is above principles.

Let's not let ourselves off the hook. We nominated Clinton who we knew to be flawed, deeply. I still admire her tenacity, but Democrats abandoned principle, as much as Mormons, in nominating her. I'm ashamed to be an American, really.  I have no idea what this man is going to do but none of it is going to be good. I'm not afraid as much as I am angry, angry at the Democrats, angry at their self-righteousness. Angry that we are now a joke nation and afraid for those American who are going to pay a high price for chasing this utopia, angry that I can no longer be proud of the country I grew up in as I had grown to be again under President Obama.

We should also share Hillary's concession speech which is a very good one.

Well, she caught me. I was invited to be part of a "secret" Facebook group of LDS for Hillary. It is nice to have a place to go to share and see things without attacks from trolls. So, as she requested, I'm coming out to share what I wrote early this morning when the pain was still so very fresh:

Grant L. Vaughn10 hrs · Centerville I'm done. My life philosophy and public service are crushed beyond repair. I can't fight for four years while working for the Trump administration. My wife (who also voted for Clinton) says I just have to get over it and move on. I don't even want to go to church. I don't want to see any of my extended family that voted for Trump. I started work during Reagan. I foolishly thought public service was a noble pursuit. It is not. It is filled with bureaucratic hassle and little respect, often outright hostility, from the general public - a public that now elected a bully to be President with a mandate to throw all us bums out (while not his highest priority, I think that's Putin-love and throwing out all Muslims and undocumented Hispanics).

I got off the bus this morning and overheard two African-American women talking. ". . . they are a dying race" is all I heard. I turned because I wanted to apologize or something but I couldn't think of what to say. They probably assumed I was a a Trump supporter. It is downtown SLC and I am white.

This is a closed, secret group, right? keep all this under your hat. I am more than devastated.

As Hillary powerfully encouraged in the most respectful way, I will carry on the fight. My wife told me not to do anything rash, but I have a few options. I probably won't expatriate to Wales right away but I might just join the ACLU. I will continue my civil service for a few more years as we are a nation of laws and I can see that the new political appointees stay within the law even if they are Sarah Palin, or worse, somebody smarter (that wouldn't be too hard).

My American Dream that I tried to express the night before last will have to wait a while. As our great President quoted the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

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Addendum, July 17, 2017

As this seems to be a frequently viewed post, let me link in here, just short of six months into the trump presidency, what I predicted would happen and what my plan of action would be. The predictions are coming true (let's hope the nuclear one doesn't - but with crazy trump and crazier Kim Jong Un, who knows?)

My predictions for 2017

My Declaration of Opposition