linnposts.com

This is my third attempt to write one last blog before I stop posting them Facebook (anyone interested can find them at linnposts.com).

I finally realized as a “thinking type” (according to the Myers Briggs personality inventory) that I needed to set aside my “thoughts” and confront the feelings about it all I began having today.

“Thinking” types like me respond to a crisis rationally. Only afterwards do we begin to deal with our feelings.

I risk sharing them (not something I do comfortably) only because you may been feeling many of the same things.

The most dominant feeling I have is that I have lost someone I love. I feel like a death has occurred and I want to turn back the clock and change what has happened.

I cannot tell you for sure what it is exactly that I have lost. That would require too much thinking to figure out and today I don’t feel like doing that. I will in time, but not now.

I also feel betrayed, specifically, betrayed by the Democratic Party I have been in my entire life. I was born into a New Deal Democratic family and all of us still are.

I supported Bernie Sanders because he sounded more like a Democrat as an Independent than any Democratic leader I had heard in years.

But the party didn’t give him a chance. Some three or so years ago they privately chose the worst candidate possible to run for president. Hillary Clinton is a better person than the public believes, but for more reasons than I care to count she was the one Democrat who couldn’t win.

She would have lost big against anyone else. Trump was the only chance she had and she could not pull it off. Just too much baggage.

Many of us knew that from the get go, but not the party bosses. Instead, they put all their support behind her in a way that sent a message to would be challengers to stay on the sidelines.

That is why they disliked Bernie. His popularity among young and older disillusioned Democrats like me exposed the fallacy that Hillary was the candidate the American people would support.

Of course there were multiple factors that led to her defeat, but at the end of the day Hillary was simply the wrong candidate, and she lost because of it.

Another feeling I have is immense sadness for the people who are feeling vulnerable – women, minorities, immigrants, Muslims, members of the GLBT community.

We have made such progress over the last eight years as a nation to practice liberty and justice for all, truly ALL, and now much of that might be lost and that is cause for genuine sadness.

I am also feeling confused by all the articles about why white Americans feel ignored and forgotten, the people for whom numerous articles and books like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy are busy trying to give voice.

I know the people they write about because I grew up as one of them. We lived in a low income, blue collar, uneducated neighborhood, but in spite of all of that, we still enjoyed all the privileges being white afforded us that our black neighbors across the railroad tracks didn’t have.

Back then expectations about life were based on the economic conditions you were in and the academic potential you had. Unless you had the latter, the former would determine your future.

As it turned out, most of the kids I grew up with didn’t go to college. They became firemen, policemen, and factory workers, and were able to build a middle class life for themselves and their families, but they were never going to be rich.

Then their jobs started going away and their kids, most of whom didn’t go to college either, found it harder as blue collar workers to make a decent wage as their parents had.

When the economic and war policies of George W. Bush caused the Great Recession of 2008, their lives went down the tubes completely.

I understand why that would make people mad at the world, but they blamed the wrong president and the wrong political party.

Barack Obama didn’t cause their suffering. The fact is, he kept it from getting worse. Had congressional Republicans been willing to work with him, the recovery would have been much more robust than it has been.

Yet the very people who have been hurt worse than anyone by Republicans who put them in the fix they are in in the first place decided on Tuesday to put them back in charge.

No wonder I am feeling confused.

I am also feeling angry. There, I admitted it. But I am not angry at the people you may think. The people for whom I have real contempt at the moment are all the evangelicals who voted for Trump.

They can give any reason they want to for supporting him, but nothing, absolutely nothing, can change the fact that they voted their politics rather than their faith. They are hypocrites of the first order, and have brought shame on the entire Christian community, and that makes me mad.

Finally, I admit that I am almost overwhelmed by the feeling of disbelief about Donald Trump being elected president of the United States.

Even writing that makes me feel like I am in a bad dream and cannot wake up. But I know it is the reality I must face.

In the days ahead I am sure my head will stop hurting, the dizziness will go away, and some modicum of rational thought will return.

But for now, I am overcome with these feelings, and more. Surely I am not alone.