TomFlannery.com

Yesterday was a sinking-in sort of day. Things were a bit foggy. It ain’t often you wake up in a brand new world.

I greeted the day the way I greet most. By pulling the covers over my head and slamming the snooze button. But I’m a grown-up and usually act like one, so I went through the motions of productivity at least. Went to work. Slumped at my desk. Starting slamming diet cokes. Jammed the ear-buds in. Fired up the Ipod. Found the appropriate mood music (early Replacements if I recall correctly, and the latest Drive-By Truckers), and shut out the rest of the world for the next 8 hours. It was dark when I walked to my car in the parking lot. I almost forgot. Daylight savings time and all that. Suddenly it seemed an ominous warning.

America has a new President. Which means that me, being a citizen of the United States, has a new President as well. The fact that he’s a blatant racist, a raging misogynist, an opportunistic homophobe, a childish bully, and a sexual predator who communicates at the level of a 4th grader matters not a whit now that the electoral votes are counted. This is a democracy, Bubba. Not a tea party.

Well, sorta anyway….there’s the electoral college thingie and all that, which means the one with the most votes sometimes loses…but whatever. The people have spoken, sometimes with spittle dripping down the side of their mouths, but still (the red and blue states still resemble a civil war battle map from 1864). Little ol’ me, being a member of said “people”, must accept the wishes of a people who elected a man who came to our area multiple times and promised, to a screaming throng of walking-dead-like supporters, that he was going to re-open the flooded anthracite mines, remove all the dead bodies (presumably?), and make America great again.

I must learn to get along in a nation that just elected Donald Trump president. I have been officially dumbed-down.

When considering who to vote for, the first thing I ask myself before checking the box is…”is this person endorsed by the KKK?”

If they are….that’s pretty much a deal breaker. I mean…..this shit shouldn’t be that hard.

I strive to be on the correct side of history, so assuming I don’t get deported and/or waterboarded in the next four years for being an enemy of the state, I’ll be able to sit my grandchild on my knee, peer outside at the large brown people-proof wall blotting out the sunlight, and say…”granddaddy voted for Bernie…”

I wish it was as easy as saying “he’s not my president”.

But he is my President. That’s the thing about elections in a democracy. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.

Reality bites. I’m all for protesting….but in this case all we’re doing is walking around in a circle. The election wasn’t rigged. Funny how that worked, eh? He won the thing….and the sooner we come to grips with it and try to stop him from dismantling what made America great before he started saying that it needed to be made great again, the better. 

And this is just the beginning. Just wait until he fills his cabinet with Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich…….a roll call of partisan slime that puts the “bat” in “batshit”. Trump is a craven opportunist with no fixed ideology….he believes whatever comes out of his mouth at the time of the utterance…and may in fact say the exact opposite the next day and deny the first bit ever happened. Trump is a homophobe because being that way was red meat to middle America. If he could get rich off gays he’d tweet-storm praise for the Indigo Girls.  People like Pence actually believe gays are lower life forms. That should concern you more. You’re giving the keys of government not only to a petulant child, but to professional, hard-core haters. Daylight savings was nothing, Set that clock back 75 years, Bubba.

You gonna keep teaching kids that they should respect women? That they should be tolerant of those different than them? Why should they believe you now? Every bully in the nation has just been vindicated.

I have daughters. Their President has bragged of sexual assault. How am I supposed to feel about that? I’ve been told I need to “get over it”.

How, exactly? Any ideas?

Does it bother anybody out there that a large group of Americans now fear their own President? A Mexican student at my daughter’s school has to spend her Thanksgiving break trying to convince her parents that they (probably) won’t get deported.

It’s good to be a white person, isn’t it? Even better…a white male. You get to be pissed off without being able to intellectualize why. How badass is that?

Where do we go from here? The thing about electing Donald Trump President is that you’ll eventually have to elect somebody else. Trump is the toothpaste out of the tube. He is fear and loathing personified…..a real live boogeyman.The unthinkable is not only off the table, it’s slithering between your legs in the dark like a snake. He’s saliva in the face of every man and woman who ever fought and died to make this country what Reagan once called a shining city on a hill. The glass ceiling that Hillary spoke of remains, but a guy like David Duke is foaming at the mouth right now to put his head through something. Maybe that sounds crazy now. But a year ago Donald Trump being President sounded crazy too.

Enjoy your wall and your higher taxes (when he said he would lower taxes, surely you didn’t think he was talking about yours, did you?) You got what you asked for….and now the best you can hope for is to be completely ignored, like you’ve always been. The only chance he’ll come to your town again is to ask to borrow your sons for one of his Putin-esqque wars….after he informs the Generals all he knows that they don’t about ISIS, of course.

For some reason, I’ve been remembering the line from the movie “Wall Street” lately. “That’s the problem with money….it makes you do things you don’t want to do.”

Hate is like that too.

We’re better than this. But then again, maybe we’re not.

Lincoln said that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. We are a nation divided against itself. And we are teetering. The fact that Donald Trump now sits where Abraham Lincoln once did could very well be the republic’s three-legged chair.

Maybe that’s the silver-lining.

But maybe….just maybe….we can overcome. For our fathers. For our children. For the ghosts that sit on our shoulder and represent the better angels of our nature.

In a bit.

–tf