Stop Telling Me to Get Over It!

Our country was just devastated. We didn't just lose an election, we will be losing a sizable portion of the good that was done in the last eight years. We'll lose the momentum, slow as it was, to be progressive with regard to race relations, and instead are going backward several decades. We'll lose the patient diplomacy that started dialogues with Iran and Cuba, and in its place will have short tempered thuggery and aggression.

We're losing these things partly because of ignorance. My wife was talking with one of her students last week after the election. The woman voted for Trump, even though she didn't know much about him. She just thought that 'we needed a Republican in the White House,' an idea that probably started with her husband since she herself admitted that she doesn't really know much about politics.

We're also losing these things because of a slave-era device in the Constitution that gives a few select electors the power to choose the President. Those people who say their vote doesn't count are, because of this, kind of right. As an example, under the Electoral College, one vote in Wyoming, a red state, equals about seven votes in California, a blue state.

We're also losing those things because our attention spans are too short. We've been pissed off about the Electoral College before, a device that historically favors conservative states. The Electoral College issue came up in 2000, when Gore got more votes than Bush, but Bush became president. We were outraged. But we got over it. We lived through not just one but TWO terms of President Bush. Now, Hillary got three million (!) more votes than trump, yet trump won the presidency.* And now, we're up in arms about it again. But with a Republican in the presidency, a Republican House and a Republican Senate, do you really think anything will be done about it now?

So we're not going to get over the worst president, the least qualified president in the history of the United States. We're not going to get over the ignorance of people who get their political knowledge from sound bites and Facebook memes. We're not going to get over having our election gutted because of an archaic concept that has no real purpose in the modern world.

We need to stay pissed off about all of these things so that, when the time comes, we can actually take whatever steps are necessary to correct them. If we get over it, we become complacent, thus lowering the bar that much more for future candidates. If you're tired of hearing about it, I guess you have a choice to make. Because I've already made mine.

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* Yes, I left his name in lower case on purpose. He is definitely NOT a capital choice.