Let me be the first to admit it. I was wrong.
The majority of Americans are like Donald Trump. You don’t vote for somebody you don’t believe represents who you are and what you believe in.
But I confess I refused to see it. I thought we were better than that. And then when I woke up this morning it dawned on me that we’re all living in Texas now.
Pundits have been saying for several years that Texas is trending blue. Turns out, the nation has been turning Texas.
Think about it.
It has a Republican controlled legislature that is determined to control women and their bodies to the point where three of them dying because of draconian abortion laws makes no different to them. They’re also doing everything they can to prevent people not like them not to vote.
The state has a governor who blames immigrants for all its problems, even putting barbed wire in the Rio Grande to catch illegal immigrants trying to cross, resulting in some dying before he was forced to remove it. He may as well have stationed Texas Rangers on the river bank to shoot them.
Texas also has an Attorney General, a crook himself, who wants to monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute any who try to leave the state to have an abortion.
It’s a state that sees social progress as “woke” philosophy and wants to keep great literature from being read in schools by Texas children.
It’s economy is controlled by big money, thrives on the mantra, “drill baby drill,” and shows no concern or interest in saving the planet.
And the majority of Texas voters continue to re-elect these same people because they are just like them.
I realize now that one of the reasons I misread this election so badly is that I didn’t realize all of us now live in Texas.
The challenge today is figuring out how to survive it. I didn’t choose to be living in Texas. And I sure as hell don’t want to be. But it’s where you and I are and we need to figure out what to do about it.
The one good thing is that we’re in the same boat together, including the minority of voters in Texas who don’t like what’s going on there anymore than we do in the nation.
Maybe that’s the first thing to remember, that we’re together as we try to cope with what comes next.
No doubt things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Trump is who he is and he is going to be a disaster worse than he was the first time around.
I’m thinking that at this point all we can do is wait for the s**t to hit the fan, and because of Trump’s incompetence, it surely will. Maybe there will be sufficient discontent in the chaos he will create that we will have an opening to get back into control of some things again. Maybe not, but it’s our only chance right now.
In the meantime, holding on to who we are is about all we can do. We may be living in Texas at the moment, but we don’t have to become Texans.
So I’ll close with this.
I have often quoted the Canadian lawyer who made the prescient comment that the United States has a long way to go to be the country most Americans believe it already is.
I apologize for being as guilty of what he said as anyone. I didn’t realize we had so far to go to become the country I thought we already were.
It’s not much consolation, but this morning that’s all I’ve got.
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