Bracing For Deplorable Times

Imagine you are driving down the street. Suddenly a kid breaks away from his mother and runs into the street in front of you from your right. At the same moment, a car is approaching from the opposite direction on your left, and you can vaguely see the faces of a family, maybe headed to church or a soccer game.

You have to choose: run over the kid, or hit the family head-on.

This is an example of the kind of decision that leaders make every day. If you kill the kid his family will forever blame you and hate you, and it is just as bad if you drive head-on into the oncoming family. Either way, if you live, you have to make a deal with your conscience. You can't not-choose, and there is no choice that is good.

It is easy to sit on the sidelines of history and complain about the choices that are made -- there will always be something wrong, because the choices are impossible. President Obama has made wise choices in a dignified way, but someone always found something to complain about. When he promoted fairness and egalitarian values they denigrated it as "political correctness," as if the Thought Police were not allowing people to have opinions of their own. As our population and technology and economy have changed, the President has made the best decisions he could, respecting the rights of new citizens, women and minorities, and young people, as well as the traditional white Americans who did not want change. But there is always something to complain about, you either hit the kid or the oncoming family.

I don't think Trump meant to win. It is easy to work a crowd up into a frenzy, complaining about things, but he does not have a plan to make things better. "Bomb the hell out of ISIS" is not a plan, it does not take into account any of the complexities of religious and tribal affiliations in the region, Russian ambitions, the wishes of the petroleum-baron sheikhs in neighboring countries, the innocence of civilians, our alliances in Europe and around world, anything. A wall on the border: it's not going to happen. It's easy to complain about people speaking Spanish and "marca uno para español," but a wall is not practical, rounding up millions of people and deporting them would be incredibly disruptive, expensive, tragic, and ineffective -- it is a fantasy, not a plan. We have almost no real trouble with Muslim immigrants -- banning them will be expensive and, again, tragic, will embarrass our country in the world, and nothing will get better. It is easy to ignite stereotypes but making real choices in the real world is harder than that. It is easy to invoke stereotypes of irresponsible welfare mothers and show horrible pictures of dead babies in arguing against abortion, but real women have complex choices to make in their real lives, and a supportive and sensible policy needs to be thoroughly and sympathetically considered. Somebody will complain, it's not about that, it is about being fair and sensible and kind, and doing the right thing.

It is not just the Presidency. The Republicans have both houses of Congress and will poison the Supreme Court as soon as they can, too. Checks and balances, the brilliant cornerstone of American democracy, will not exist for the next four years. Never mind what has happened at the state level, which may turn out to be the big story.

Our side was not prepared for this, any more than their side was. Everyone overestimated the reasoning ability of the populace, but after all these years of talk radio and Fox News the message has sunk in -- uneducated white Americans do not feel they should have to share the power or bother to understand people who are unlike themselves, they want "their country" back.

It is never too late to start fighting back, I hope. The key is in that word "uneducated." The right has undermined education at every step for many decades, and now they have a great dumb mass of people who cannot think objectively or critically, do not respect facts over comforting rumors, do not know the difference between logic and self-aggrandizement. These are people who are easily persuaded by simple images and cheerleading. Our long-term goal has to be education. If the people have knowledge and can reason competently they will not fall for a gang of evil clowns like we just elected.

In the short term we must not let bigotry and ignorance become normalized. You will hear the talking heads on television making tacit assumptions about immigrants, Muslims, LGBT people, women, about jobs and energy and the environment and the economy -- do not accept them when they adopt the language of the fascist right. We have to speak up every time. My intuition says that the ACLU is going to be central to this effort, they are the ones who will actually file the papers and fight back in the legal arena, and we need to get behind them. We have to grow an underground, we need to be explicit among ourselves, the decent people, about what is true and what is important, and we need to cling to that and to each other through these times.

Trump may establish a new order where our freedoms are lost forever, or he and his Basket of Official Deplorables may simply flounder foolishly, in over their heads, for four years. Whatever happens, this is time to organize and stick together, to resist and undermine bigotry and small-mindedness. It is going to get bad, one way or the other, and we want to pull through it intact. I believe America is full of good people, and we need to stick together and regain control of our own history.

I see a lot of people on the Internet saying this is just democracy, one side won and now the other side gets a turn. But that only works if you maintain freedom of speech and the press, if the government is committed to representing everyone, and this team does not care about that, or want it. This democratic experiment only works if we make sure those basic fundamentals remain intact. We can endure four years of narcissistic vanity and incompetence if the Constitutional framework is upheld, and it is our job to see that it is.

Our new President believes in getting even, believes in humiliating those who cross him, he is not going to let criticism go unpunished. Good people who speak their mind will be our new heroes.