On Nov 9 2016 I wrote the following:

In Mourning…

All day I’ve been feeling like someone close to me has died. It started, of course, around midnight last night when it was becoming obvious Trump would likely win the election. I went to bed, fell asleep actually, but woke around 3:00 am to go to the bathroom and on my way back to bed I took a look at 538.com on my phone and although Trump hadn’t quite got all the electoral college votes he needed he was almost there, with Clinton having no chance. I couldn’t fall asleep so I watched a movie on Netflix until 5:00 am dozed off and got up about 8:00 this morning (having made sure I wouldn’t hear the 8:00 am news with Trump making his acceptance speech) feeling such a sense of loss.

I’m Canadian – I didn’t, couldn’t, vote in the election but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a personal stake in it. Like everyone else around the world I will be personally affected by decisions this president-elect will make and there is no reason to believe he will make a 180° turn now.

David Remnick said what I was feeling and fearing:

All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.

Thomas Friedman was also direct:

Donald Trump cannot be a winner unless he undergoes a radical change in personality and politics and becomes everything he was not in this campaign. He has to become a healer instead of a divider; a compulsive truth-teller rather than a compulsive liar; someone ready to study problems and make decisions based on evidence, not someone who just shoots from the hip; someone who tells people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear; and someone who appreciates that an interdependent world can thrive only on win-win relationships, not zero-sum ones.

I can only hope that he does. Because if he doesn’t, all of you who voted for him — overlooking all of his obvious flaws — because you wanted radical, disruptive change, well, you’re going to get it.

And I just got an email from a Canadian friend who got the following from a Canadian friend of hers:

This morning I feel like the  loss you feel after losing a family member in an horrific accident.   I guess we have.  Careful reflection will be needed in the grieving process to be sure it is not instead a fatal epidemic. 

Feel free to pass on the message and to join me in this time honored expression of grief. 

Jane

So I’m passing on her message and while I may not wear a black armband I’m certainly feeling the loss.

Nov 6 2024

Today I’m grieving.
What else is there to say?

Nov 6 2024 @ 9:15pm

I had this to say to a friend who’d written me during the day:

I have nothing new to say! I said it in 2016.

Grieving, angry at people who can’t see what’s coming at them. There’s been plenty of warning.

My friend Ruby, 92, has a friend who is also 92, born in Holland in 1932. She spent her early years living through the build up to WWII. The family owned a farm. During the fighting, they sheltered downed allied pilots. She remembers taking food to Canadian airmen hiding under the floorboards of the barn where the cattle were housed. 

For the past months she’s been worrying about what she clearly sees is coming. She lived through it then. Ruby said the other night she (her friend) was in tears and feeling terror like she experienced as a small child. There are too few of these people left alive.

I was born in 1943. I don’t remember the actual war, but I remember the troops coming home, and I remember the years immediately after the war – the late 1940s and what people wrestled with and tried to understand.

There is no reasoning with those folks who voted for hatred and division. They will feel it when their health care is diminished if not eliminated. They’ll feel it when the crazy tariffs raise prices like nothing they’ve seen yet. They’ll feel it when actual people they know are deported. They’ll feel it when climate change escalates bringing more fire and flood and hurricanes and tornadoes and drought because the administration refuses to admit such a phenomenon exists. They’ll feel it when allies back away and strengthen ties among themselves isolating the US. They’ll feel it when more and more women die needlessly because of a lack of women’s health care… I could go on and on. Maybe then, they’ll take a look at what’s happened to them and understand it was the choice they made.

We’re not far from the same situation here in Canada.

The western crazies aren’t going away. Poilievre is going to puff up his chest and swagger about imitating the idiot to the south. He’ll bad mouth Trudeau and because people are tired of Trudeau they’ve stopped listening/hearing his message of building for people and will support the “hate and division” parade.

Here in the east there’s a lot of scepticism about Poilievre – a reasonable number of people may be reflecting on what’s happened today and believe we need to take another path, not the one that denies climate change and won’t plan for it. Some people will understand we (Canada) need to scale back our dependence on gas and oil and continue to accelerate green options. They’ll be concerned about housing and food costs and the limited availability of both for many. They’ll think about how to help with the medical emergency across the country. They’ll think about inflation and tariffs and maybe understand we need to disentangling our trade dependence on the US and look for allies and customers and partners elsewhere in the world. Even though most don’t listen to CBC they might think about how that organization still ties us together across the country.

At least I can hope so, but I’m not holding my breath.

Judith

Nov 9 2024

Just finished reading Jamelle Bouie’s opinion piece in today’s NYT.

The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.

But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.

Precisely what I’m expecting to unfold. Read the whole article: What Do Trump Supporters Know About The Future He Has Planned For Them?

Here’s John Pavlovitz:

The election results, while a cheap and easy high to red voters in the moment, will prove to be a mirage that gives way to a grim reality that no rally speech can distract them from. 

And maybe, just maybe, in the coming weeks and months when there is no Democratic president or congress to lazily blame for the fact that they can’t pay their mortgage, afford their medical bills, sustain their business, or provide for their children, they might actually be ready to stand alongside us and defeat the real enemy within.

Here’s hoping when that times comes, it won’t be too late. 

MAGAs have lost, too. They just don’t know it yet.

If you listened, read, paid attention to what trump said, if you took any time to read synopses of Project 2025, you’d have realized what is going to happen over the next 100 days. They said it out loud. They shouted it from the treetops!

You just weren’t paying attention…