Oops. No hurrah? Nobody's cheering? Nobody's cheering up!
Everybody I've encountered on this "day after" seems still mired in fear and loathing. What good are miracles if people won't lift their heads up and look? Mark Shields of PBS Newshour said last night much the same thing, that people are exhausted and depressed by Trump. (He's one of my Shields relatives.)
Rachel Maddow called the Democratic victory in Alabama a miracle when the reddest state in the union elected a Democrat to the Senate last December. I called it a miracle too. It was.
But it wasn't enough to cheer people up. Nor was the outcome in the statewide elections in Virginia that preceded it.
And now Pennsylvania's18th isn't enough either.
Donald Trump and the media have scared the beejeebers out of people.
I have to work day and night trying to keep all age levels of people from being scared. Trump and his shenanigans have them really frightened. They really believe he and the N. Korean hair guy are going to start a nuclear war, that the world is "very violent" now, that something has gone wrong with America as shown by Trump getting elected, that everybody is cheating, that the world is coming to an end because of global warming, that Soc. Sec. and Medicare are running out of money, that serious voter suppression is going on and getting worse, that the Democratic party is finished, and that Trump is taking over as a dictator.
None of this is true. Unless people really buy into it. Believing it will happen can make much of it come true. That's because believing things are inevitable suffocates resistance to them. Being hopeful isn't naive. It's immensely practical. After all, what do you have to lose by being hopeful?
I came of age in the cynical 1950s of the Beatnik era.Then as now, liberals had to believe in the negative land of "drive on by, nothing good to see here". "Beatnik" stood for "beaten". I liked the Beatnik writings, the energy of "On the Road". And I liked the clothes. The look.
But I never bought into the "we are beaten" outlook. Nor the "God is dead" belief.
Before the 50s even ended we few, we hopeful few had started the civil rights movement, had done the first sit-in complete with being waterhosed, and were two minutes away from starting the environmental movement with Save The Bay.
We went right on and saved the Bay, saved the redwoods, saved historic buildings and rid LA and all other American cities of smog. We got rid of segregation and ended the war in Vietnam. A few of us women stepped up before there was Women's Lib and took what we wanted and pushed and pushed and pushed the envelope. We had stopped being polite, pretty, and passive (although 40 years later I was getting women college students who were still into the Three Ps).
In our lifetime the poverty rate of the world has plummeted to near-zero. Illiteracy has virtually disappeared. Many terrible illnesses have been eradicated. Medical advances have been legion.There haven't been any world wars. Nations pull together and help each other out when disasters or famine strike. (They didn't help each other back in the "good old days".)
Genocide is no longer tolerated.
Racism has been so suppressed that the last of its aged and ignorant adherents are fighting like the blue blazes to keep it alive. They will fail. In 2017 the last high school class in Texas graduated that had a white majority.
Diverse sexuality is widely accepted. Whose family doesn't have a homosexual or lesbian ? Now families know that people they love are ________ (fill in the blank) so they don't care any more about who is what. It's all in the family!
God was declared dead in the 1950s. I crept around still going to Mass while my intellectual friends sneered at me. Then their children got killed in a car crash or died of cancer. So I renamed God for their sake and called Him "Love". They needed comfort and would accept me saying things like "Love is stronger than death." Etc. Just no three-letter words, please. And I had to comfort them as best I could. Because that's what G-O-D means to me, i.e. help your fellow humans.
Before leaving this topic of what's better now than what used to be, I have two personal things. The founding of Israel is one. (America did that.) Never again will the Jews be without a place to go when the murderers come. The second thing that I find very cheery is that after 400 years of fighting and persecution, being burned to death en masse in our churches or deported to Australia, being denied education and basic rights, but fighting on and on until the Irish finally drove the English out of Ireland. Oh, yes. There was starvation too. A million dying of starvation, dead by the roadside, their faces green from eating grass.
When my Jewish family had to flee Poland and my Irish great-grandparents had to run from the English soldiers for being Fenians, they came to America. America saved our lives.
When my Jewish family had to flee Poland and my Irish great-grandparents had to run from the English soldiers for being Fenians, they came to America. America saved our lives.
Right now the Chinese are not killing 40 million of their own people in the name of Communism; the Russians aren't killing 20 million of their own people in the same questionable cause. They did that in the 20th century. And the millions in Southeast Asia aren't killing each other as in the 1970s. And we aren't killing them either although we are still enmired in the Arab world.
Latin America too has calmed down. For example, Argentines aren't "disappearing" by the thousands. (
Op-Ed Contributor
The Death of a Genocide) Venezuela is the exception, suffering badly with lots of hunger. If we had a decent political party in charge in Washington, we'd be trying to help out. But we don't and we can't. Maybe that will change soon.
We would want to help if we could. That's what keeps me a cheerful person in a society of long faces and "stress". Knowing that Americans have indeed done rotten things (e.g.slavery, genocide of the Native Americans,etc.) but that we want to do better, want to be helpful and kind. And we have been working on those principles for 200 years of being Americans, almost always trying to live up to out ideals, even the unwritten ones. Americans are the only country in the world with anything like our philanthropy, both public and private. And let's remember it was Bill Clinton, bad as he was in some ways, who worked on getting the English out of Ireland.
So don't let Trump and the "bought and paid for" GOP majority in Congress get you down. We'll whip them in November.
Just as we did Tuesday in Pennsylvania's 18th District.
Meantime may Love bless you on your way and inspire you to love one another. That is the greatest riches in the world. I know because I have lived almost 82 years and seen everything. And trust me, things are good now, the best they have ever been in all of human history. Check that out. It's true. And things will get even better.
Because you are here to make it happen.
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