You hadn’t heard of Rumi?!?
Fix that ASAP:
This is only a start.
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No it doesn’t. Roughly 16 million new voters will be eligible to participate in the next election, while roughly 10 million people will die in the next four years. That’s a net change of roughly 25 million voters.
(Note1: very rough calcs. Feel free to reduce that to 20 million if it makes you feel better about overlaps and suchlike)
(Note2: calcs ignore immigration and emigration - the 16M new voters are purely people who’ll turn 18 over the next 4 years)
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Also doesn’t account for those who will die without healthcare, or in wars with China and Mexico, or from botched abortions, or from hate crimes…
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Lack of immigrants gaining citizenship, immigrants who do have citizenship leaving because their relatives were deported, increasingly bold voter suppression in GOP trifecta states…
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I am rethinking my opposition to becoming a citizen while Trump is president. I might do it just to contribute to the immigrant statistics that will go against his name.
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USAians:
Save this link:
https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials
Use it to find your senators’ and representative’s contact pages. Save those.
Call. Write. Every time there’s an outrage, every time Trump does ANYTHING that requires congressional approval.
Give them hell.
FWIW, I am told that calling the LOCAL office of a congressperson is the most effective way to get noticed.
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Yeah, I’m worried, but now is the time to stand up for America as an American. Politics corrupt our collective American vision. It is time to stand up together, for America. For together, we are one democracy, and perhaps we can make American progress together, instead of in our political tribes. It is time to be pan-Party, and stand up together, as one America, for regardless of our significant differences as people, as tribes, we are Americans, and this is our country. Let’s make America greater than it was last week, for I think we can agree, America needs work.
I, for one, stand up for America.
insert Pledge of Allegiance
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Please, please do, and also move to Florida or Ohio.
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I know. This is truly a frightening story. Pence is like a Cheney Model 101 Cyberdyne Conservative with a Cardio module upgrade and a complete rewrite of the Public Persona module:
“It cant be bargained with It cant be reasoned with It doesnt feel pain. Or remorse. Or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever.”
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Well, let’s not go overboard…
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To be fair, I’m asking you to make a sacrifice I wouldn’t make as a natural born citizen.
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It wasn’t a bad position to take in itself, but now that we have stated out position as being the rule of law, as opposed to “we’re tougher than you”, we cannot reverse that position without showing that the new president (when he becomes such) has actually broken the written law, as opposed to the natural law against having a gentleman of colour as lawfully elected president. As Mr Trump (as I have been forcing myself to call him since the election, rather than other things that I could call him) looks like being the lawfully elected president, barring an unprecedented mass reversal by the electoral college, then we are honour bound to treat him as such, or show ourselves to be as bad as those we attacked for their treasonous attacks on Mr Obama.
This is something that is kind of going to have to be worked out on a continual basis. Like a lot of things from the past I’m still in shock at seeing become relevant, there’s an old art from the American intelligence community they called “Kremlinology” The Soviet system was deeply opaque, and figuring out what they were actually thinking and planning from public statements was a tricky business.
I’d say with “Trumpology” there are at least 3 observations I can see to start with.
When he has that smug, I’m so clever look on his face, like he thinks he just came up with the best idea the world has ever heard, it’s something he believes in enough that he’ll really try and do it, for example the Muslim ban.
If he seems like he feels like he’s been cornered and forced to say it, like the statement telling his supporters not to engage in hate crimes and many other signs of “seeming normality” he’s probably full of it, and will only stick with it as long as he feels forced to.
When he sounds like “yeah that sounds reasonable” like when he was talking about keeping big parts of Obamacare, or punishing women for abortions it’s something that he thinks sounds reasonable right now, because someone just talked to him about it, or because he just doesn’t care much or have a better answer and it’s a coinflip as to whether he’ll stick with it.
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I still reserve the right to disrespect him:
#notmypresident
#noreallyimactuallyirish
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I think Sam Harris sets about the right tone for people wishing Trump success:
I thought President Obama struck the right note yesterday. We all must hope for Trump’s success at this point. We want his presidency to be a good one. It’s as if we’re all on an airplane together, and the real pilot has died, and now a man who has never flown an airplane has taken the controls and is attempting an emergency landing, and we’re all stuck in the back of the plane. So we’re rooting for the man in the cockpit.
Of course, before he got his hands on the controls, some of us complained about how unqualified he was. There were a few other people back here with a lot of time spent flying planes, but this guy stormed the cockpit, and now he’s in the pilot seat, and the runway is in view, and we are out of time. So, let’s hope he’s talking to the people in air traffic control.
But the problem, of course, is that it actually matters who’s in the tower. Just think about who Trump has surrounded himself with: Rudi Giuliani, Chris Christie, Sarah Palin, Mike Pence—this is a clown car of ideologues and incompetents, with a couple of religious maniacs thrown in. Again, we want him to land this plane, and it doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t matter if we all wind up covered in vomit. We will be grateful just to be alive. And I will be very grateful if after four years Donald Trump hasn’t set back human progress a generation.
This all may sound like hyperbole, but who knows what sort of mistakes this man is capable of? And if you said that about Clinton, you are just wrong. Even with all her flaws, we have no idea who Trump is or what he will do. He probably doesn’t even know. But we do know that he has less understanding about the responsibilities he’s about to assume than any president before him. Indeed, he has less understanding than any candidate most of us have ever conceived of. So, let’s hope he’s a quick study, and let’s hope there are thousands of good people who are willing to work for him.
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Point of order:
As Americans, the generally accepted etiquette suggests that we are to respect the office of the president. By which we mean the role of the president, rather than the room in which (s)he works. It is not necessary to respect the specific person currently inhabiting that office, only the office itself (again, the role, not the room).
As such, when he is wearing his presidential hat and engaging in presidential business (i.e.: not yet), we must call him “Mr. President”. We must stand when he enters a room. We must not sit until after (s)he sits, except in certain situations (when (s)he is giving a public speech, for example). We must not behave disrespectfully toward the office of the president, but we can absolutely be disrespectful toward the policies (s)he proposes or puts into effect, or other choices (s)he makes.
And when he is not wearing his “President” hat, we absolutely can be disrespectful toward his person, as well. As Americans, it is our tradition to respect the office of the President of the United States of America, the same way we respect our Congress, our Senate, and our Judiciary. However, our traditions do not require us to respect the specific people who happen to hold any of those offices at any given moment.
In practice, of course, this whole “respect the office” etiquette thing is possibly quaint and outmoded, these days. Certainly the public at large haven’t seemed to really care much about it for as long as I’ve been voting. But anybody who says that our presidential etiquette says we have to support Trump now? Not so much.
Edit: Writing just the first two paragraphs of this has pretty much converted me to the “they as gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun” movement. Totally am going to write that differently, next time.
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Not sure if this is an example or exception - Germany worked out (arguable) fine but external regime changes don’t have an excellent track record. Afghanistan is a nice example as a pacification was tried multiple times. Not exactly successful, be it Brits, Soviets or Americans.
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Perhaps not literally true, but if you are already writing off 47%, you are treading a path that Mitt Romney found didn’t work too well.
At base, what I’m worried about is that we’re gradually changing the metric for failure of the Trump administration in the public’s eye from “was terrible” to “imprisoned or executed 100,000 people”.
I’d really hate to see Trump take a second term because all he did was gut civil rights, destroy science, and increase racial discord and thus is considered successful because we don’t literally have “Trump Troopers” rounding up minorities.
Not only that, but by expending scarce resources (public attention) on the bad precursors as proof of terribleness, I fear we we will have acclimatized the public to our cries so they ignore it when there’s actually something they might worry about. (And their standard for proof is much higher than ours.)
Lastly, I’m now in the regrettable situation of being only two-steps removed from someone who committed suicide because of the panic and fear of what the next administration will bring. Whether the Trump can or is interested in following through is a question that no-one knows the answer to, perhaps not even Trump. By claiming the worst case (full blown autocracy) has already arrived (and yes, it might), we’re helping driving people into real depression.
Trump’s own words were the basis, of course, but when the entire community of people you know and trust is echoing that he means every word and will be able to get it executed, it pushes fear into outright panic.
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This is if you have the faintest belief that Trump wants to be a good president by any definition. This isn’t mittens or even Dubya.
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