Reflections from a Blue State

"Today we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land...."
-Joint statement of Democratic leaders of the California legislature.

My mind is still a mass of random thoughts trying to coalesce into a rational reaction to our national election. Once again I find myself living in a pocket of people who think more or less like I do. We have our differences, but we listen  to each other and respect the right to differ. A headline in our local paper read, "State goes left as US turns right"

Here are a few of my thoughts:
There is a large group of people in this country who have been left behind by progress. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared leaving them feeling that they have no options. They are poor, undereducated and desperate. They feel that the entire government which has ignored them for so long should be dismantled. They are angry. This I understand.

But many of them seem to want to go back to the 'good old days' of Ozzie and Harriet nuclear families, There is no such thing as progress in this view  It is all about regression to a paternalistic time when women were kept in their place. abortion was illegal, many jobs were closed to women and the rest paid less than men were paid for the same work and LGBT people stayed well hidden. Apparently Trump's message appealed to these ideas, even though his actions and his story blatantly belied such a vision. This I don't understand. It may be populism but only for certain people. It is  dismantling much of what is good about our country for something that no longer exists.

How could even one Hispanic person, one black person, one woman, migrant or person with disabilities have given this man their vote? I despair to think that even people who have been insulted, belittled and ignored would feel it was worth putting all that aside for a bunch of empty promises. Donald Trump famously has a two minute attention span and brags that he doesn't read. I don't see how he will ever accomplish any of his campaign 'promises'. I heard a Hispanic organizer sum it all up by saying "maybe they're hoping that he will be different in office than he was on the campaign trail..." That's a pretty frail reason for voting for anybody....
 
At least they voted. Once again I'm appalled at the number of people who didn't even bother to exercise their right to vote. In doing so, they have allowed a man who is not fit to run a third world country to be elected. 

We cannot keep taking our rights and freedoms as American citizens for granted. We must listen to each other with respect. We must have open minds and we must be willing to compromise. We must work tirelessly to close the enormous income gap, to build bridges and not walls and to stop screaming at past each other. Nobody has all the answers. It will take all of us collectively to find them, and it's going to be damn difficult with a leader who spends more time looking in the mirror than he does reading a book.