Welcome to America

View From Here
David Mark Greaves
This election was a glass of cold water in the face followed by a double slap to make the Democrats understand that being awake to reality is different than being “woke,” to political correctness. It certainly was that for me.

As an apparently wild-eyed optimist, I was going to thank America for coming through, laugh at the billionaires and the power-hungry extremists, pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, kill the Citizens’ United decision, end the Trump tax cuts, close the carried interest loophole, and raise the income limit for Social Security deductions to a million dollars. What a fool.

Instead, Vice President Kamala Harris, super-qualified by conventional standards, lost the Presidency to a convicted felon, former President Donald Trump, whose qualification for the office is the truth he knows about the American people.

He knows that talking about dangers to democracy and the threat of fascism doesn’t mean much against a paycheck that can’t keep up with the cost of groceries, gas, and everything else.

He knows that they don’t like Black and Brown people coming in at will, they don’t like transgender sports participation, don’t like the idea of college students getting loan relief of tens of thousands of dollars each and no one relieves their loans, and I even cringe a little when I hear “non-college-educated whites,” seeming to imply that they are “less than” and thought of negatively as an “other.”

He knows that his present “enemies list” is not a concern to a majority of people, who may feel that a complete house cleaning is a cure for the pressures on their lives and a restoration of what they have as a vision of what the nation should be.
He taught us what he knows about misogyny, racism, how powerful hate and fear are, and how to use them.

And if the effects of the implementation of Project 2025 are somehow mitigated for Trump supporters and propagandized as to their benefit, then that will not be of a concern either, and the rest of the citizenry will have to suck it up. Just as we thought they would have to do.

From this election, we’ve learned that most of the nation is not who we had hoped they were and that the march to freedom will be longer and over more treacherous terrain than we had imagined, but it will be a walk in the park compared to what our ancestors endured.

The great Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave abolitionist and orator, said to “Organize, organize, organize” and “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
That was true 150 years ago, it is true today, and it will be true tomorrow. The struggle continues, and in our hearts, we always knew it would.