America

I wanted to get this said before the electors cast their votes and we’re off on another round of impassioned argumentation: I’ve decided there’s an upside to the fact that a lying, ignorant bigot won the election.

Which is not to say – and I hope this is obvious from earlier posts – that I’ll be glad to see him and his cronies in office. Not a day has gone by in which I didn’t feel a sense of doom regarding this horrific turn of affairs. But it’s time to take the long view.

The fact is, some of us are getting a badly needed wake up call.

We’ve been guilty of complacency. We’ve allowed the Internet to become a de facto propaganda machine for the ignorant and for those whose evil designs depend upon enlistment of the ignorant.

We continue to tune in to ‘News’ outlets that are little more than conduits for partisan rants. And yes, I mean MSNBC and NPR just as much as Fox and Breitbart. When we stopped demanding ‘fair and impartial’ and accepted news-as-entertainment we surrendered our right to be informed. That has to change or nothing else will.

Four years after Sandy Hook, we have a President-elect who is in bed with the NRA. And we – all of us, red or blue or in between – helped put him there.

I could go on but what’s the point? Those who elect to read this journal are already shamed by the recent electoral outcome.

But I believe there is an upside. I see elements of it every day. I see it in the North Carolinians who protested and accepted arrest rather than let a brazen, anti-democratic power grab go unchallenged.

I see it in my fellow bus riders who go to lengths to smile and chat and reassure each other.

I see it in the outrage and the disappointment and, yes, the fear of people of good will who seem to have found a renewed dedication to the cause of true democracy.

Yes, this is a scary time. But we’ll get through it. We’ll survive him and them.

Because we’re America. We pull together when the chips are down.

And they don’t get much further down than they are right now.