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penpusherSteve Scalise Among 4 Shot at Baseball Field; Suspect Is Dead - The New York Times Wednesday June 14, 2017
Partisan politics commentary where people of a differing political stance have chosen to call each other “selfish,” “stupid,” “insane” or worse. Much worse. It's difficult not to see the above event as possibly a result of such responses. And it's something we have to address.
If we are to understand where the United States is, politically, we have to go back in time and examine where we were. Let’s turn back the clock and go for a trip to a previous USA, all the way back to the mid twentieth century!
The world of politics during the Eisenhower era is not at all the same landscape as today. Sure, the press and the politicians did have an adversarial relationship, as they always have had (it serves to remember, when the country first began, many politicians WERE the press, more or less committing what today would be considered libel against their competitors in newspapers, by using pseudonyms, writing scathing essays and trying to win the favor of public opinion), but in the twentieth century, the relationship between these two bodies was relatively friendly. Everyone knew why they were there, and all involved understood and respected the roles that each played.
When examining the crucial Presidential Election of 1960, a few things should be noted. The first is that the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard Nixon had, to some degree, bought his popularity. That fact takes us even further back in time, to 1952, when then Senator Nixon made his infamous “Checkers” speech.
Full video of the “Checkers” Speech – dated September 23, 1952
(You do not have to view the speech in its entirety; I just posted it here as reference. But notable is Nixon’s stumble over the word “integrity” in the very first seconds of the speech – in the game of Poker, that would be considered a “tell”)
The concern by many at the time was that Nixon could be on the hook for “paying back” special favors because of the donations he received to reimburse his coffers. Imagine a topic like THAT being relevant today!
Dwight Eisenhower didn’t have much good to say for Ol’ Dick, towards the end of his term, either. The thirty-fourth president was asked if he could give an example of a major idea of Vice President Nixon’s that was adopted by the Administration.
His reply: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” And the press conference where that exchange was made occurred on August 24, 1960, just some seventy-six days before the election. That’s why that comment became a paid political announcement for the JFK campaign!
The reason we need to look at the Richard Nixon of 1960, here and now, is that this was the start, the tiniest snowball at the top of what seemed to be a molehill at that moment, that would eventually avalanche down to where our political “sensibilities” have come.
That “Checkers” speech, for better or worse, likely saved Nixon’s career as a politician. By going on television and pleading for kindness and understanding about his circumstances in 1952, to talk about a little dog for his children, Nixon used television to appeal to the masses. It worked! The candidate was forgiven for whatever negative actions people perceived, and he went on to become Vice President for eight years during Eisenhower’s administration.
But the 1960 Presidential election was another animal altogether. Instead of Nixon simply discussing an issue, face to camera with viewers, he was forced to be measured, side by side, against John F. Kennedy on the screen. For Nixon, the comparisons were odious. Kennedy looked like a president. Nixon in his plain grey suit simply blended into the background, a sweaty and sad little guy.
Though the popular vote was very close and Nixon won twenty-six states, JFK carried the day and Camelot came into being on January 20, 1961.
Then came Oswald.
Lee Harvey Oswald, a guy who wanted to defect to Russia. Oswald, a guy who purchased a rifle by mail order. Oswald, a guy who attempted to kill General Edwin Walker, a military man Oswald saw as a “right wing Hitler” for wanting to march in and take over Cuba. Oswald, a guy who just happened to get a job working at the Texas Book Depository a few weeks before, who then heard that the president was coming to Dallas and that his motorcade would pass right by his place of business.
Lee Harvey Oswald's Mug Shot
Oswald wanted fame. He wanted glory. He wanted to be remembered. He had his opportunity with the arrival of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
This is where the next great shift in our collective politics occurred.
After the assassination, after Oswald killed officer J.D. Tippit in his attempt to escape, after Jack Ruby stepped in and killed the suspect before he could even be thoroughly questioned or put on trial, after examining a film captured by Abraham Zapruder, a local dressmaker, and after President Johnson assigned a special commission, led by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, the results of the investigation were revealed in the wake of a grueling and extensive examination of the facts.
The Warren Commission, handing their tome of a report to President Johnson in the Oval Office
In short, the Commission said the following: Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but there was no conspiracy, no involvement with a foreign agent or government. Oswald acted alone.
The trouble was that almost immediately, there were people who doubted the facts of the Warren Report.
A likely part of the reason for this doubt was that the Commission paneled to do their work, investigated in almost complete secrecy. There were no press briefings, no reveals about what was discovered as it happened. Just a long ten-month silence followed by an almost three-hundred-thousand-word document describing their findings.
Then came the conspiracy theorists. Mark Lane, a lawyer who would eventually represent James Earl Ray, the man who stood accused of killing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote one of the first books contradicting the findings of the Warren Commission. “Rush to Judgment” was not just a book, but became a documentary film, displaying what he considered holes in the report.
Rush to Judgment: the full-length film based on the book of the same name by Mark Lane.
Lane presented perhaps the most compelling case against the Warren Report. But Lane wasn’t the only one. There were a lot of books. Some of these authors were sincere, and trying to get more information out to the public. Others were, in fact, opportunists, out to gain fame and fortune by selling their non-reality based theories to a public searching for answers. Never mind that most, if not all of the Warren Report deniers didn’t have all of the facts the Commission sifted through. There must be a government cover up and a conspiracy, came the cry.
That cry became very convincing. After so many books, films, television examinations, forensic reports, news specials, thought pieces, and discussions with friends, relatives, neighbors, acquaintances, and total strangers, sharing all of the above, the American Public had to start believing in a conspiracy, simply because so many “experts” said there had to be. And it was easy to want to believe in a conspiracy, rooted in the disbelief that a non-entity like Oswald could kill the Leader of the Free World all by himself. The charismatic, charming, affable and young president, done in by some rat, some weasely nobody who probably should have been permitted to remain in Russia when he asked to stay.
No matter what you personally believe happened on that day in Dallas, this was, in a very substantial way, the first time for many Americans to doubt the message their government gave them. That's important.
The 1960s went on to provide a lot of political fodder for everyone to engage. Between the war in Vietnam, a war that President Johnson felt he had to win, at the cost of so many young American troops, and the Civil Rights issue, that threatened to create a new Civil War within our own borders, politics was very much a matter of life and death.
This is where partisan politics got raised to a whole new level. As President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964, a whole group of Americans who thought that black American citizens did not deserve the same rights and privileges of their white counterparts, changed parties. The so-called “Dixiecrats” of old, people like Strom Thurmond, switched their allegiance to Republican, which set the tone for the modern day version of the GOP.
The Vietnam conflict was a huge issue. With the draft being up and running, any son from any family, rich, poor, white or black could be called to serve. This is why protests against the war overwhelmed the nation at that time.
What most people don’t think about, when they consider President Johnson’s stance on Vietnam, was that his top General in the region, William Westmoreland, did not give his Commander-in-Chief the full scope of the details of what was happening in the war, and how that was making for a difficult, if not impossible, circumstance for the United States to win.
General William Westmoreland
It’s interesting to note that Westmoreland eventually went on to run for Governor of South Carolina on the Republican ticket. Could that difference of political opinion have had an effect on his openness about the situation with the president? It’s impossible to know, but it’s interesting to consider. Johnson’s intention to win in Vietnam was a major reason for his unpopularity, and he chose not to run for re-election in 1968, again changing the course of our history. But it was a general whose politics disagreed with his president, that we might say greatly shaped the choices and the results of that action.
Richard Nixon back again.
Richard M. Nixon appearing on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" The famed line: "Sock It To Me?"
Watergate. The name itself has come to mean “scandal,” as many Americans attach the final four letters of the word to anything that could be considered a corruption. Most recently, the bold face lie of “Pizzagate” as an example of its usage.
But Watergate and Nixon are a touchstone, and a big cause of the bitterness of Republicans toward Democrats.
The situation was that a corrupt group of Nixon’s associates wanted a job and decided to break in to the Watergate complex and determine what the Democrats had planned for the 1972 election.
The irony is that Nixon won the White House by a landslide, defeating George McGovern who only won the District of Columbia and his home state of Massachusetts.
The 1972 US Presidential Election Electoral College Map
But the action was done, the elements were illegal and the coverup brought him down. But before Nixon could be formally impeached, he resigned. And before the investigation could continue, his self-appointed Veep, Gerald Ford, gave him a presidential pardon, effectively ending everything!
All hell broke loose because, in a manner similar to President Kennedy’s end, there was no definitive result, no clear understanding of what actually happened, despite a couple of years’ worth of testimony. Another failed ending. Even Nixon’s staunchest supporters had to find this unsatisfactory. Their guy had to leave office and he left under a cloud of suspicion that remains to this very day.
Let’s briefly touch on Jimmy Carter’s decision to boycott the Moscow 1980 Summer Olympics, after the USSR invaded Afghanistan, clearly an act of aggression. People suggested that we did not boycott the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics, sometimes referred to as the “Nazi Olympics” with Chancellor Adolf Hitler in power. Why were these athletes, who trained so hard for this moment, being denied their opportunity to shine on the world stage? But Hitler hadn’t gotten to the atrocities that were going to plunge the world in to a second global conflict at that point. Ultimately, history tells us that the Moscow boycott was both a brave and a correct thing to do.
And there was Reagan’s Iran-Contra circumstance. It was simply a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” The policy: do not give enemies of the state weapons under any circumstance. The action: Giving weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages being held in Lebanon. It was all done behind the back of Congress, a unilateral move by the Executive branch that broke all policy.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North got to be a household name for all the wrong reasons during the Iran-Contra Hearings
But the element that links directly to our 2016 election was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and it explains the anger and the frustration many conservatives feel when they talk about what they believe is “right.”
White House Intern Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton
Clinton clearly committed perjury when he claimed he did not have sexual relations with his intern, Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. And GOP people were having a field day with all of the antics that were going on surrounding this. They wanted Clinton arrested.
And while they got their impeachment proceedings, they didn’t get the punishment they were hoping to have. Compare this to Nixon. Tricky Dick lost his job because of his scandal. Slick Willie got to serve out the remainder of his term. The resentment about that cannot be underestimated. People on the right were apoplectic! If twitter had existed back in 1996, there might still be some tweets about it, today.
Again, briefly, George W. Bush’s presidency was characterized by September 11, 2001 and the war he began with Iraq as a response, and by Hurricane Katrina, and how bungled the efforts to care for the Gulf Coast region in the wake of that natural disaster made many Americans believe they didn’t matter.
The New Yorker Magazine cover dated September 19, 2005 featuring George W. Bush and his chief cabinet members, swamped
So when Barack Obama took office, the atmosphere was changing, and people were being more positive, even in the wake of a economic collapse that threatened to become a global depression. But even as President Obama began, the Republicans worked to figure out how they could diminish and reduce his effectiveness. That’s where the “Tea Party” began, just shortly after President Obama took the oath in 2009. And that’s where the Republicans in Congress decided to not do anything if it was something President Obama wished to accomplish.
Barack Hussein Obama and Michelle Obama, Inauguration Day, 2009
Finally, the issue of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is the element that especially angered the folks on the right. During the Lewinsky scandal, many people at the time were upset that Hillary chose not to leave her husband, despite the actions of a philanderer. It was all a part of the narrative that said that Bill didn’t get punished properly for his actions, and this recalled JFK’s White House, where folks like Marilyn Monroe and other, lesser known women, were a part of a syndicate of sexual partners, something that was known, possibly hinted at, but never discussed openly in the press during that era.
But the thought that Bill Clinton could be back in the White House, and this time with no important responsibilities? That point alone was enough for many to make sure that Hillary would not win.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Of course, there were other issues, like the fact that we still have not had a proper discussion on the topic of sexism, and many folks especially in the more rural parts of middle America, do not see a woman as a “proper” Commander-in-Chief. There were the hacked emails, revealing that the DNC didn’t want Bernie Sanders to have a “fair” chance at the nomination, angering many of Bernie’s supporters and making them vote for another candidate. And there was then FBI Director James Comey, who came out with a statement a week before the election, that he found new emails that may be incriminating against Hillary.
So, here we are. A collection of Americans who are diametrically opposed to how the other group sees the world, to the point where we might want to kill each other because of it. How we see each other and what we want to happen requires that we actually listen to each other and be a bit more understanding about our fellow humans. What we choose to do next is going to help determine how our country will progress for the next ten, twenty, maybe even fifty years. And, why not? It took us over a half century to get us here. Let's hope we act, and not react.
//
This thinkpost was written for LJ Idol, using the prompt: Current Events
Partisan politics commentary where people of a differing political stance have chosen to call each other “selfish,” “stupid,” “insane” or worse. Much worse. It's difficult not to see the above event as possibly a result of such responses. And it's something we have to address.
If we are to understand where the United States is, politically, we have to go back in time and examine where we were. Let’s turn back the clock and go for a trip to a previous USA, all the way back to the mid twentieth century!
The world of politics during the Eisenhower era is not at all the same landscape as today. Sure, the press and the politicians did have an adversarial relationship, as they always have had (it serves to remember, when the country first began, many politicians WERE the press, more or less committing what today would be considered libel against their competitors in newspapers, by using pseudonyms, writing scathing essays and trying to win the favor of public opinion), but in the twentieth century, the relationship between these two bodies was relatively friendly. Everyone knew why they were there, and all involved understood and respected the roles that each played.
When examining the crucial Presidential Election of 1960, a few things should be noted. The first is that the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard Nixon had, to some degree, bought his popularity. That fact takes us even further back in time, to 1952, when then Senator Nixon made his infamous “Checkers” speech.
Full video of the “Checkers” Speech – dated September 23, 1952
(You do not have to view the speech in its entirety; I just posted it here as reference. But notable is Nixon’s stumble over the word “integrity” in the very first seconds of the speech – in the game of Poker, that would be considered a “tell”)
The concern by many at the time was that Nixon could be on the hook for “paying back” special favors because of the donations he received to reimburse his coffers. Imagine a topic like THAT being relevant today!
Dwight Eisenhower didn’t have much good to say for Ol’ Dick, towards the end of his term, either. The thirty-fourth president was asked if he could give an example of a major idea of Vice President Nixon’s that was adopted by the Administration.
His reply: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.” And the press conference where that exchange was made occurred on August 24, 1960, just some seventy-six days before the election. That’s why that comment became a paid political announcement for the JFK campaign!
The reason we need to look at the Richard Nixon of 1960, here and now, is that this was the start, the tiniest snowball at the top of what seemed to be a molehill at that moment, that would eventually avalanche down to where our political “sensibilities” have come.
That “Checkers” speech, for better or worse, likely saved Nixon’s career as a politician. By going on television and pleading for kindness and understanding about his circumstances in 1952, to talk about a little dog for his children, Nixon used television to appeal to the masses. It worked! The candidate was forgiven for whatever negative actions people perceived, and he went on to become Vice President for eight years during Eisenhower’s administration.
But the 1960 Presidential election was another animal altogether. Instead of Nixon simply discussing an issue, face to camera with viewers, he was forced to be measured, side by side, against John F. Kennedy on the screen. For Nixon, the comparisons were odious. Kennedy looked like a president. Nixon in his plain grey suit simply blended into the background, a sweaty and sad little guy.
Though the popular vote was very close and Nixon won twenty-six states, JFK carried the day and Camelot came into being on January 20, 1961.
Then came Oswald.
Lee Harvey Oswald, a guy who wanted to defect to Russia. Oswald, a guy who purchased a rifle by mail order. Oswald, a guy who attempted to kill General Edwin Walker, a military man Oswald saw as a “right wing Hitler” for wanting to march in and take over Cuba. Oswald, a guy who just happened to get a job working at the Texas Book Depository a few weeks before, who then heard that the president was coming to Dallas and that his motorcade would pass right by his place of business.
Lee Harvey Oswald's Mug Shot
Oswald wanted fame. He wanted glory. He wanted to be remembered. He had his opportunity with the arrival of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
This is where the next great shift in our collective politics occurred.
After the assassination, after Oswald killed officer J.D. Tippit in his attempt to escape, after Jack Ruby stepped in and killed the suspect before he could even be thoroughly questioned or put on trial, after examining a film captured by Abraham Zapruder, a local dressmaker, and after President Johnson assigned a special commission, led by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, the results of the investigation were revealed in the wake of a grueling and extensive examination of the facts.
The Warren Commission, handing their tome of a report to President Johnson in the Oval Office
In short, the Commission said the following: Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but there was no conspiracy, no involvement with a foreign agent or government. Oswald acted alone.
The trouble was that almost immediately, there were people who doubted the facts of the Warren Report.
A likely part of the reason for this doubt was that the Commission paneled to do their work, investigated in almost complete secrecy. There were no press briefings, no reveals about what was discovered as it happened. Just a long ten-month silence followed by an almost three-hundred-thousand-word document describing their findings.
Then came the conspiracy theorists. Mark Lane, a lawyer who would eventually represent James Earl Ray, the man who stood accused of killing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote one of the first books contradicting the findings of the Warren Commission. “Rush to Judgment” was not just a book, but became a documentary film, displaying what he considered holes in the report.
Rush to Judgment: the full-length film based on the book of the same name by Mark Lane.
Lane presented perhaps the most compelling case against the Warren Report. But Lane wasn’t the only one. There were a lot of books. Some of these authors were sincere, and trying to get more information out to the public. Others were, in fact, opportunists, out to gain fame and fortune by selling their non-reality based theories to a public searching for answers. Never mind that most, if not all of the Warren Report deniers didn’t have all of the facts the Commission sifted through. There must be a government cover up and a conspiracy, came the cry.
That cry became very convincing. After so many books, films, television examinations, forensic reports, news specials, thought pieces, and discussions with friends, relatives, neighbors, acquaintances, and total strangers, sharing all of the above, the American Public had to start believing in a conspiracy, simply because so many “experts” said there had to be. And it was easy to want to believe in a conspiracy, rooted in the disbelief that a non-entity like Oswald could kill the Leader of the Free World all by himself. The charismatic, charming, affable and young president, done in by some rat, some weasely nobody who probably should have been permitted to remain in Russia when he asked to stay.
No matter what you personally believe happened on that day in Dallas, this was, in a very substantial way, the first time for many Americans to doubt the message their government gave them. That's important.
The 1960s went on to provide a lot of political fodder for everyone to engage. Between the war in Vietnam, a war that President Johnson felt he had to win, at the cost of so many young American troops, and the Civil Rights issue, that threatened to create a new Civil War within our own borders, politics was very much a matter of life and death.
This is where partisan politics got raised to a whole new level. As President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964, a whole group of Americans who thought that black American citizens did not deserve the same rights and privileges of their white counterparts, changed parties. The so-called “Dixiecrats” of old, people like Strom Thurmond, switched their allegiance to Republican, which set the tone for the modern day version of the GOP.
The Vietnam conflict was a huge issue. With the draft being up and running, any son from any family, rich, poor, white or black could be called to serve. This is why protests against the war overwhelmed the nation at that time.
What most people don’t think about, when they consider President Johnson’s stance on Vietnam, was that his top General in the region, William Westmoreland, did not give his Commander-in-Chief the full scope of the details of what was happening in the war, and how that was making for a difficult, if not impossible, circumstance for the United States to win.
General William Westmoreland
It’s interesting to note that Westmoreland eventually went on to run for Governor of South Carolina on the Republican ticket. Could that difference of political opinion have had an effect on his openness about the situation with the president? It’s impossible to know, but it’s interesting to consider. Johnson’s intention to win in Vietnam was a major reason for his unpopularity, and he chose not to run for re-election in 1968, again changing the course of our history. But it was a general whose politics disagreed with his president, that we might say greatly shaped the choices and the results of that action.
Richard Nixon back again.
Richard M. Nixon appearing on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" The famed line: "Sock It To Me?"
Watergate. The name itself has come to mean “scandal,” as many Americans attach the final four letters of the word to anything that could be considered a corruption. Most recently, the bold face lie of “Pizzagate” as an example of its usage.
But Watergate and Nixon are a touchstone, and a big cause of the bitterness of Republicans toward Democrats.
The situation was that a corrupt group of Nixon’s associates wanted a job and decided to break in to the Watergate complex and determine what the Democrats had planned for the 1972 election.
The irony is that Nixon won the White House by a landslide, defeating George McGovern who only won the District of Columbia and his home state of Massachusetts.
The 1972 US Presidential Election Electoral College Map
But the action was done, the elements were illegal and the coverup brought him down. But before Nixon could be formally impeached, he resigned. And before the investigation could continue, his self-appointed Veep, Gerald Ford, gave him a presidential pardon, effectively ending everything!
All hell broke loose because, in a manner similar to President Kennedy’s end, there was no definitive result, no clear understanding of what actually happened, despite a couple of years’ worth of testimony. Another failed ending. Even Nixon’s staunchest supporters had to find this unsatisfactory. Their guy had to leave office and he left under a cloud of suspicion that remains to this very day.
Let’s briefly touch on Jimmy Carter’s decision to boycott the Moscow 1980 Summer Olympics, after the USSR invaded Afghanistan, clearly an act of aggression. People suggested that we did not boycott the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics, sometimes referred to as the “Nazi Olympics” with Chancellor Adolf Hitler in power. Why were these athletes, who trained so hard for this moment, being denied their opportunity to shine on the world stage? But Hitler hadn’t gotten to the atrocities that were going to plunge the world in to a second global conflict at that point. Ultimately, history tells us that the Moscow boycott was both a brave and a correct thing to do.
And there was Reagan’s Iran-Contra circumstance. It was simply a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” The policy: do not give enemies of the state weapons under any circumstance. The action: Giving weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages being held in Lebanon. It was all done behind the back of Congress, a unilateral move by the Executive branch that broke all policy.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North got to be a household name for all the wrong reasons during the Iran-Contra Hearings
But the element that links directly to our 2016 election was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and it explains the anger and the frustration many conservatives feel when they talk about what they believe is “right.”
White House Intern Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton
Clinton clearly committed perjury when he claimed he did not have sexual relations with his intern, Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. And GOP people were having a field day with all of the antics that were going on surrounding this. They wanted Clinton arrested.
And while they got their impeachment proceedings, they didn’t get the punishment they were hoping to have. Compare this to Nixon. Tricky Dick lost his job because of his scandal. Slick Willie got to serve out the remainder of his term. The resentment about that cannot be underestimated. People on the right were apoplectic! If twitter had existed back in 1996, there might still be some tweets about it, today.
Again, briefly, George W. Bush’s presidency was characterized by September 11, 2001 and the war he began with Iraq as a response, and by Hurricane Katrina, and how bungled the efforts to care for the Gulf Coast region in the wake of that natural disaster made many Americans believe they didn’t matter.
The New Yorker Magazine cover dated September 19, 2005 featuring George W. Bush and his chief cabinet members, swamped
So when Barack Obama took office, the atmosphere was changing, and people were being more positive, even in the wake of a economic collapse that threatened to become a global depression. But even as President Obama began, the Republicans worked to figure out how they could diminish and reduce his effectiveness. That’s where the “Tea Party” began, just shortly after President Obama took the oath in 2009. And that’s where the Republicans in Congress decided to not do anything if it was something President Obama wished to accomplish.
Barack Hussein Obama and Michelle Obama, Inauguration Day, 2009
Finally, the issue of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is the element that especially angered the folks on the right. During the Lewinsky scandal, many people at the time were upset that Hillary chose not to leave her husband, despite the actions of a philanderer. It was all a part of the narrative that said that Bill didn’t get punished properly for his actions, and this recalled JFK’s White House, where folks like Marilyn Monroe and other, lesser known women, were a part of a syndicate of sexual partners, something that was known, possibly hinted at, but never discussed openly in the press during that era.
But the thought that Bill Clinton could be back in the White House, and this time with no important responsibilities? That point alone was enough for many to make sure that Hillary would not win.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Of course, there were other issues, like the fact that we still have not had a proper discussion on the topic of sexism, and many folks especially in the more rural parts of middle America, do not see a woman as a “proper” Commander-in-Chief. There were the hacked emails, revealing that the DNC didn’t want Bernie Sanders to have a “fair” chance at the nomination, angering many of Bernie’s supporters and making them vote for another candidate. And there was then FBI Director James Comey, who came out with a statement a week before the election, that he found new emails that may be incriminating against Hillary.
So, here we are. A collection of Americans who are diametrically opposed to how the other group sees the world, to the point where we might want to kill each other because of it. How we see each other and what we want to happen requires that we actually listen to each other and be a bit more understanding about our fellow humans. What we choose to do next is going to help determine how our country will progress for the next ten, twenty, maybe even fifty years. And, why not? It took us over a half century to get us here. Let's hope we act, and not react.
//
This thinkpost was written for LJ Idol, using the prompt: Current Events