An Irrelevant Opinion
It’s shit. Of course it’s shit. We all know it’s shit. It’s awful and insane and oh so very very stupid.
And it’s so easy for me to comment calmly on it, all the way in untouched Australia, which is no better than America but is lucky enough not to have Donald Trump in it. It’s ridiculously easy for me to sit back and smugly give my detached opinion on something that affects me less than almost anyone. People much closer to it than I are angry and scared and that’s fair enough, because you don’t get election results this scary, or this infuriating, very often in a lifetime.
Still, like I said, it’s ridiculously easy for my to smugly opine, and I like easy things, so…
My impulse is to say, “Everything will be OK”. This is not because I necessarily think it WILL be OK, it’s more because so many people are upset and hurting and I want them to feel better.
But everything MIGHT be OK. It still might. More people voted for Clinton than for Trump. And more people than that didn’t vote at all. That great nation, the USA, is bedevilled with more than its fair share of dreadful and difficult problems, but if there are hordes of bigots and idiots storming the barricades, I believe there are at least as many hordes of decent, intelligent folk who will man those barricades — maybe with a little nudge in the right direction.
And I think those who did vote for Trump…they did it for a lot of different reasons. Fear, and hatred, and stupidity, and ignorance, and racism, and sexism, and probably for the majority of them, the plain fact that he was the Republican nominee and they’d voted Republican all their lives and weren’t going to change no matter who was in the chair. Which I guess is a whole other kind of stupidity.
But I also believe that when you’re digging down to find root causes, you don’t stop at bigotry, because even bigotry itself is caused by something. I don’t claim to always know what that something is, but I think we’ve got to have more hope for humanity than to simply consider a large chunk of us irredeemable and try to shut them out of our world. Especially because I don’t think that works.
I guess what I’m saying is, I have hope. I think the Democrats messed up big time, and I think the Republicans took advantage of the ugliest in human nature, and I think the contest was one between bad options within a terrible system, and I think its aftermath will be nasty and destructive and possibly even violent. Like everyone else, I’ll probably argue about this and smack my forehead about how naive everyone else is being, like they’ll smack their foreheads about me.
But I have hope. I have hope that the good guys won’t always be bad at their jobs and that the bad guys won’t always be good at theirs. More than that, I have hope that the bad guys won’t always be bad guys — I don’t think people are irredeemable, and I don’t think that people who do bad things, or make bad choices, always do so because they’re bad people.
The sun comes up tomorrow, and everyone gets on with their lives, because regardless of politics, living has to be done. And even though something momentous happened yesterday, something huge and astounding, the world today isn’t all that different from what it was the day before. The people are the same, good and bad and in-between in all the same proportions. And I have hope for them, and for me.
So many of you are good. Sometimes we disagree and fight and drive each other mad with how obtuse we seem to each other, but the world is swarming with good people.
That’s not enough to make the world good, but it’s a start, right?
