We live in a country where nearly 62 million people elected a president who is contemptuous and ignorant of the Constitution of the United States of America (specifically the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth amendments).
We live in a country where nearly 62 million people elected a president who denies the reality of climate change and will allow the Keystone pipeline to move forward, lift restrictions on fossil fuel production, and dismantle environmental regulations.
We live in a country where nearly 62 million people elected a president who extols Vladimir Putin and who also plans to cancel every executive action and order of President Obama.
We live in a country where nearly 62 million people elected a president who defrauds people through his bankruptcies and his so-called “Trump University,” a person who is also a defendant in a sexual assault case of a minor, a person who exacerbates hatred toward Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Muslim Americans and who has degraded veterans, women, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, and the disabled.
We live in a country where nearly 62 million people elected a president who disrespects the Gold Star parents and their dead son, who has pledged to deport 11 million Mexican immigrants, who wants to ban Muslims from entering this country, and who expressed a willingness to use nuclear weapons.
We live in a country where nearly 62 million people elected a president endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and other white extremists and populists, a person who has empowered fascists and white nationalists and appointed a white supremacist and anti-Semite as his presidential advisor, a person who has appointed a "slew of Wall Street bankers and industry insiders and special-interest lobbyists to run the show in his transition team."
We live in a country where nearly 62 million people miscalculated the unequivocal danger in voting for an unstable-impetuous-vulgar-xenophobic-vindictive-irrational-inarticulate narcissist, racist, bigot, sexist, misogynist, and liar.
-Glen Brown
Mike Davis looks at the numbers and the politics of the Trump win. http://inthesetimes.com/article/19642/not-a-revolution-yet-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-exit-polls
ReplyDelete- Fred Klonsky
“MAKING HOPE PRACTICAL AND DESPAIR UNCONVINCING--With the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency, America is in a new historical moment in which the old is dying and the new is waiting to emerge. What must be made clear is that what is distinctive in this historical moment is that American democracy, however fragile, is slipping away into the dark shadows of authoritarianism. Yet, all societies contain sites of resistance and progressives need desperately to join with those who have been written out of the script of democracy to rethink politics, find a new beginning, and develop a vision that is on the side of justice and democracy. Hope in the abstract is not enough. It has to become the foundation for action or what might be called hope in action, a new force of collective resistance and a vehicle for anger transformed into collective struggle, a principle for making despair unconvincing and struggle possible. While we may be entering a period of counterrevolutionary change, it must be remembered such periods of radical change are as hopeful as they are dangerous. Hope at the moment resides in those young people and others intent on turning despair into hope, struggling to reclaim the radical imagination, and working to build an expansive collective movement for real symbolic and structural change in the pursuit of political and economic justice. We need to accelerate such movements before it is too late”—Henry Giroux.
ReplyDeleteFrom Antony Harper:
ReplyDelete"Next steps: Reorganization of the democratic process so that it is actually democratic, and in tandem with this reorganization an improved educational perspective with regard to breadth of understanding the world-system we all inhabit, including but not limited to expanding student sense of context, improving student ability to make appropriate connections in the face of the massive complexity of our current world-system, and finally improving the ability of students to ask deep, probing questions. [All this of course implies that teachers will be taught to teach these improvements!]."
We live in a country where 42% of women voted for a man who brags about sexually abusing women.
ReplyDeleteWe live in a country where Catholic Latino voters voted 8% more for Trump than for his opponent.
We live in a country where 62 million people voted to elect a man who brags about being smart enough to pay no taxes or greatly reduced taxes.
We live in a country where almost 64 million people voted for Hillary Clinton. That left almost 2 million people without the voice they were promised in their civics high school class.
ReplyDeleteExtraordinary and prescient list. Not altogether prescient, of course; one year later, we know now (even more firmly I guess) how mistaken we knew-we-were even then. Maybe this has changed: Last year you could write "We live in a country ..." and not blink. This year, it's arguably clearer that we don't live in [one] country anymore. It's clearly going to take a lot of Civics lessons to get us back to one (assuming that's where we ought to go).
ReplyDeleteWe live in a country where 650,436 voters in Alabama voted for a pedophilic, homophobic racist.
ReplyDelete