Election 2016: I’m Taking the High Road
I woke up with a headache at 4am CST. My phone was inundated with notifications, private messages, texts, and one missed call. Friends from everywhere were stunned at the unfolding electoral map. I didn’t want it to be true. But it came apart faster than a piñata at a baseball camp.
Today as I gathered myself, I realized that over half of this country believes what Trump is selling. I’m not going to paint them with the racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic brush that we’ve used on them before. It is unfair to say that about half of this country. I applaud Secretary Clinton’s efforts, she made a strong case for her presidency but, it wasn’t enough. I now know how Karl Rove felt as he watched the map flip for Obama eight years ago. It was unthinkable to him that more of the country disagreed with him than agreed with him.
Those red urban counties, the red rust belt, the vast red tracts of Republican territory in the “fly-over states” came out swinging. Record voter turnout and barely any really close races. Folks, we don’t have the senate, house, OR the White House. We fear all the worst about our future. We summon Hitler references and paint the bleakest of pictures. We say there’s never been a worse future for this country. And we end up sounding like the opposite end of the same spectrum. The opposing end were the same ones chanting Obama was a Muslim and was coming for our guns and imposing martial law.
I want to take the high road and treat this next president with the respect the office deserves. I want to go high when they go low. I want to look at the next four years as more than just an endurable amount of time. I want to believe it will be worse in our minds than in actual reality. But, then again, I also wanted to believe there was no way a candidate with that level of inexperience and such a bombastic personality would get within a stone’s throw of the White House.