Spending lots of time alone with my acoustic guitar. Finding new riffs to fill the void. I am only tangentially engaged with the world at the moment. So many pictures and words I just don't want to see or read. It's funny. I truly am mourning the death of an idea, a dream, a vision of my future and the future of my country.
I do see this as a pivot point in time. And the pivot is in a backward, reactionary direction. It's heart-breaking to point out that by the time all the counting is done, the progressive woman with a firm grasp on policy, the most qualified candidate, will end up with around 2 million more votes than the other person. The progressive woman won the "popular" vote. Which is the actual, real vote!
And this interview enlightened me... why do we have an Electoral College? Seems it was basically an inducement to entice the slave-holding states of the South to join the union of states. So instead of one man/one vote, we concocted a mechanism to give weight to smaller states, and established electors who actually elect our President. It's useful to recall that many of our Founding Fathers were slaveholders, they embraced Democracy, but their version excluded African Americans, women, and Native Americans.
America. Dig a little deeper, just below the surface, and somehow racism and slavery (and of course genocide) always come to the fore. Slavery, racism, sexism, prejudice, are truly America's original sins.
In my lifetime this has come back to haunt us big time. I try to imagine a President Gore being elected in 2000 or a President Hillary Clinton in 2016 and my heart skips a beat. Both won the popular vote!
It's also sadly ironic, that it is the now the former slave-holding states that are so intent on preventing & suppressing the votes of African Americans. First they were worried they'd be underrepresented in the new country because their slaves couldn't vote, and now they are doing their best to make it really hard for the descendants of slaves to vote today.
Did anyone say, diabolically tragic?