Skip to main content

My Second Final Word on the Election

I really thought VP Harris would pull it off. Not with any help from me. And I knew Georgia would go for Trump this time (last time was an anomaly, a fluke). 

I believed it because of two things I will never believe again: the media and polls. 

And she really, really didn't. I feel sorry for her; she's being blamed with accusations that were not entirely her fault. But I'm glad she lost. I do not think she has the qualities or fortitude to lead this country in foreign policy, and her domestic polices are too leftist. To say nothing of how terrible a communicator she is.  And she should have picked Shapiro from Pennsylvania. Her first choice said a lot. She wanted a VP who would not outshine her.

This is not to say I'm happy about Trump. He didn't get any help from me either. But no one can say he didn't win legitimately, he won't throw a temper tantrum this time, and there will be a relatively peaceful transfer of power with civility. We haven't seen that since 2008 (Melania claims the Obamas did not do it). 

And the rest of us can live our lives as citizens, parents, professionals, neighbors, and believers. 

I am disappointed in Christian leaders who succumbed to the binary choice and voted for Harris. That took them down a notch for me in respect. To be counter cultural might mean to opt out from the binary choice when both are bad and to leave it in God's hands, rather than vote against your conscience and common sense.  

Trump is not a good person, but I hope he is a tad wiser this time around and stops those shenanigans and shuts his mouth and lets people do their jobs in Congress. There are signs this might be true. He has the opportunity to set things right. If I am honest about the "leaving it in God's hands," then I will be diligent in prayer, sincere, nonironic prayer. 

For me, there are a few take-aways from this election. 

The media is corrupt, specifically the news media and pundits. I am deeply upset with Atlantic Monthly. They became nothing but an anti-Trump organ. I understand their disdain for him. I don't understand why they turned away from its mission of quality. But it's always been more leftist than I wanted to admit. Years ago they published a long piece on why Lincoln would have been (essentially) pro-life, and a lot of its readership went wild. Not exactly nonpartisan there. 

Second, polls are so wrong. 

Third, the majority of American people think the Democrats went too far. It might be Afghanistan, the border, the economy, the sense that parents' relationship with their children is being intruded upon, Israel v. Hamas, Ukraine (I hope not, because I am pro-Ukraine), or COVID. It's probably a mix of these.  The Dems need to return to the center. 

Fourth, politics are too important in everyone's lives. 

I'll stop.  Let's live our lives, folks.  




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why to Read Fiction, Idea #27: Empathy, anyone?

The Idea #27 is tongue in cheek.  But these are some ideas about writing fiction, which I have done in ten novels (and counting), a dozen short stories, and two produced plays (I know, not exactly the same).  Background: In 2015 a colleague and I wrote an open educational resource public speaking textbook for a grant provided by our University System. We didn't realize at the time that it would go viral and be used all over the world within a few years. There are two reasons for that: it is good (as good as anything on the market) and it is free, although only in digital form. Check out www.exploringpublicspeaking.com for it. We also didn't know at the time that my co-author would die at 39 in 2016. I still miss him. Back to the point, I receive requests for the test banks every other day, and this morning I received one from Pennsylvania. The writer had a signature line: "Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Books I Have Read Lately

 Retirement means more time to read.  One Blood , by Denene Millner. This book and author won the Townsend Prize for Fiction 2025 and therefore beat me as one of the other nine finalists. She deserved it for her dramatic and exotic style; mine feels pale in comparison. I have to admit, I have timed out on it when I got to the third main character's story. It starts with a Black midwife in 1950s/1960s Virginia, who is imprisoned for not lying on a birth certificate about a "white" baby's racial identity. The baby is clearly part Black, meaning either the family had Black ancestors or the mother had a lover (I'm not entirely sure about that). The midwife's daughter is brutally murdered by her lover and in this chaos, the granddaughter is spirited away to New York in a wooden box. (Why I am not sure--New York makes sense, because a relation lives there, but why she couldn't just be put on a train, I'm not sure. I imagine Black people could ride trains in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Poem of the Day

 Vision Driving on a busy highway designed to relieve traffic on a busier one, My glimpse lands on a mound of color in the turning lane ahead. I see a human body. That is not what it is, but what my mind perceives. The envisioned body is wearing a bathing suit, and it is female. It is deceased of course; half of it is legs with pale skin, half is a mix of red and blue and yellow. My heart tightens; my eyes, which need to look elsewhere, are captured. I go under a traffic light and the pile transforms into a towel twisted into some elongated shape, either thrown and dropped from a vehicle. Why did I see a corpse in the way of oncoming cars? Are my eyes failing me? My corrective lenses? My imagination? My expectations? Is it too much true crime television? Who knows? And what if I had seen a human form that metamorphosed into a towel? --- This is more about a concern of aging, not to show my poetic skill. I write one or two (or fewer) poems a year. ...
Post a Comment
Read more