I lived through Reagan who was a teflon Nixon, but wasn’t old enough to really get just how absolutely vile his admin was. I expect we’ll have another incompetent figurehead like we had with Reagan/Bush Jr., with a similarly corrupt apparatus running the show. Not looking forward to the coming horrors, not one bit, esp. with a GOP Congress and soon a GOP SCOTUS.
I feel their despair. A large portion of my country (or maybe not my country) just told me to get fucked. If I were younger, not in the middle of a PhD and family rearing, I’d be out there with them, maybe.
Lots of people in this country do not care about me or my daughter. How am I supposed to square that? When do I get to be pissed about that? When do I matter as much as white nationalists misogynists?
Yeah, I remember Thatcher, but she was just what I thought Prime Ministers were. I grew up in a Conservative, Torygraph reading household, so I don’t remember Kinnock being portrayed positively. I do remember my first political thought was to support him for his anti-nuclear weapons stance though.
I never thought I’d say thank God for the police in my life. Thank you Portland police.
These fools are playing into a trap that’s been waiting since Ford was in office. Read Wikipedia’s write-ups on the Insurrection Act and Federal State of Emergency. Protesting democracy is a worse mistake than running Clinton was. Civil war isn’t a parlor trick.
I was in Kindergarten when Nixon went down. I do remember being in 1st grade and knowing about Pres. Ford. I wondered if he was related to the cars and kind of assumed you named cars after presidents since my dad drove a Ford and my mom drove a Lincoln. My parents were very pro Ford (and very anti-Carter, and very pro-Reagan) and I had no perspective other than theirs. I remember vilifying Carter, and making fun of Amy Carter with the kids at school, and the kids bullying the Iranian kid whose parents fled the revolution (I’m glad I was nice to him, but that’s mostly chance). My mom blamed unions, liberalism, and Satanism which were roughly interchangeable for all the wrongs in the world. It took a good while for me to see just how warped that all was.
I hear about the schoolkids today chanting “build the wall” in cafeterias and throwing down the various racist slurs their president-elect has been throwing down, and seeing video of kids screaming “Trump that Bitch,” and I have a 100% sympathy for protestors.
He wasn’t anywhere near as bad, though. First off, he was intelligent. Secondly, he did have a sense of civil pride and purpose. Obviously, a lot of paranoia as well, and ethics unbecoming of a Quaker, but we’re now in utterly uncharted territory. The only people who are happy are 99.9% those who will be most screwed by his administration and 0.1% those who – because they know how to manipulate him and the world around him – will win big by being part of it.
I highlighted the important part, in case you couldn’t find it yourself. People are hurt, angry, and frightened, because a xenophobic racist misogynistic Islamophobe with a virulently anti-woman, anti-LGBT running mate who did not win the most votes is going to be president. They have every right to assemble (peaceably) and express those feelings in the hopes of influencing public and political opinion.
Well, this wasn’t a Black Lives Matter protest, so I’m guessing the protesters were mainly white, because that’s what we have here. Also, they did bust out the flash-bang grenades eventually.
Protesters are not saying the election was illegitimate. They are saying they’re not okay with the fact that their fellow citizens just handed the country over to, to borrow the Germans’ term, a horror-clown and his cabinet of horrors.
Nixon and Reagan have nothing on Trump. They were conventional bent machine politicians who exploited bigotry for power; Trump, OTOH, is an ignorant non-politician whose core support and family background is in the Klan.