I am going to be mad for a while

I first heard the yowl at 9:37 PM last night .

“MOTHERFUCKERRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!”

It was coming out of my own mouth. I was surprised at how loud it was. As I walked into the kitchen, I pictured hurling my wine glass at the brick fireplace. Gawd, that would’ve felt so good.

The election was fucking me over. America, and my fellow citizens, were fucking me over. The election process, the media, and my new neighbor on the corner with the Trump sign were fucking me over.

How? Why? HOW?????

I channeled my better self when talking to my children this morning. In America, sometimes your candidate loses. Even though I’m unhappy with the election results, I always want America to thrive. I hope that a President Trump (ouch … that stings to write) will do good things. I hope I was wrong about him.

I do mean all of that. But before I can say all of that without choking, I have some anger and grief to process.

Because my worst self wants to say WAY TO GO, ASSHOLES. My worst self wants him to fail so everyone who voted for him will see what a giant mistake they made. But I can only feel like for about a second because if he fails, we all pay. And no one will feel bad about electing him anyway because any of his failures will be blamed on Obama’s legacy.

People are saying that we have to move forward. Look on the bright side. Make lemonade out of arsenic. Got it. Thanks. But I’m not ready yet. I need to sit and fully feel this horrifying mess before I can start looking forward. And I don’t think having a post-mortem and asking how we got here is a bad idea. I probably don’t have the mental juice to pull that sort of discussion off right now, so instead I’m just going to make a list of things I’m angry about:

1. A portion of America has been brainwashed. When fact checking is positioned as a partisan strategy, then it’s hard not to think that people are being conditioned to just choke down whatever info is being fed to them. Here’s a quote from a Rush Limbaugh show from September:This fact-check technique is the latest. Let me tell you what it really is. There is no fact-checking. The fact that The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and USA Today, and all these other papers and networks now have fact-checkers is for one reason. It allows them to fool you into thinking they have an objective, nonpartisan staff or person analyzing everything the candidates are saying, and telling you what they’re saying is true, or what they’re saying is false. When in fact the fact-checkers are no different than the biased left-leaning reporters and columnists at these papers and on networks. But the fact-check, the idea that it is a fact-check story is designed to say to you that it is objective and analytically fair, and all it is is a vehicle for them to do opinion journalism under the guise of fairness. Which, if you fall for it, gives it even more power, because if you think that the fact-checkers like PolitiFact or Snopes, or whoever else, if you quote them constantly as the Bible, well then you’ve fallen for it.

   Fallen for what? Facts? How does this make any sense? This has been going on for a while now. Discrediting anything unfavorable to the conservative position as a liberal media ploy is a standard argument for just about everything.

   (Important note: I’m not talking about all conservatives here. I have some conservative friends who make it a priority to dig deep and come to their own conclusions. While I do not always agree with them, I appreciate and respect their dedication to doing their own research.)

2. The Democratic establishment needs a foot up its ass. (Here you go. Feel free to use mine.) People have spent decades hating Hillary Clinton. Whether that’s fair or not, whether she’s qualified or not … these things don’t matter. There was a massive, massive, massive portion of the vote she never had the slightest prayer of getting. There are people who would vote in a child molester before they’d vote her in. (And yes. I know. They might have. Dear God I hope that story isn’t true because it’s horrendous.) The point is, electability matters. It’s really short-sighted to pretend otherwise.
3. RACISM. Van Jones on CNN late last night did such an amazing job of characterizing what’s going on our country right now and what we need to do move forward. Watch it. It’s less than two and a half minutes. Paraphrasing here: “We don’t want to feel like someone threw away some of us to appeal more deeply to others.”I think a lot of people who voted for Trump wouldn’t characterize themselves as racist. But after last night, we know 50% of the country is OK putting a racist in the White House. That’s nauseating. (As of this writing, it looks like Clinton may have won the popular vote. Neither candidate got more than 50%.)
4. I’m gonna say it: my friends who consider themselves people of faith. I don’t get how so many of you could back this hate monger. Even the Pope has spoken out against Trump. I consider many of you very intelligent. I know that many of you are extremely charitable. Are you that conditioned that you’ll fall in line with whoever is at the top of the Republican ticket? That is the only conclusion I can come to.  I do not understand. I do not understand. I do not understand.
5. People who can’t stop being douchebags now that the election is over. I have not unfriended one single person throughout the election. Not one. Until just now. I’m not quiet about my views and I often find debate useful. But to troll my page the day after the election when a lot of us are grieving and attempt to argue why my and my friends’ viewpoints are wrong … it’s just classless. Post whatever you like on your own page but stay offa mine.
6. Memories of all the non-sensical, uniformed, offensive crap that Trump has spewed during the last few months. This pussy-grabbing, tiny-fisted racist and his oversized ego are going to be occupying the Oval Office. So many things to worry about there. So very many things. I can’t even start …
7. The state of journalism. Because of the Internet, journalism is not a money maker any more. There’s still some good reporting going on, but there’s not nearly enough of it. Context is often missing. Candidates are not pressed to clarify themselves and they aren’t held accountable. And now we’ll have a President who already has a history of banning media outlets that haven’t portrayed him the way he’d like. My only hope is that he’s pissed enough people off that they’ll be looking at him very closely.

This too shall pass, right? Right?

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