“America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, ‘You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.’ You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”
The American President

I’ve always loved those words in the movie, The American President. Unfortunately, we forget them sometimes.

I was glad the election was over and hoped to move forward regardless of who won, but in the word of Pacino in Godfather 3, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

The only reason I’m writing this is that I’m starting to get annoyed and this is my place to come and vent so if you want to bail on this post, I completely understand. For those who stay, I’ll try to be brief.

If you’ve read my blog at all in the last few months, you know I haven’t commented much on the election and that I’m not a fan of either party or candidate. It was an ugly campaign conducted by two people who are low on the character scale and in my opinion, neither one was/is worthy of holding this office.

But someone had to be elected and the process played itself out. Fine. The winners celebrate and the losers cry for a couple of days. That’s the way all games are played and this one, played out with a couple of demagogues, was no different.

But if you listen to the media, who refuses to let this go, you’d think Mother Teresa lost to Idi Amin. Come on now. Let’s be honest.

Is Trump capable of leading this country and is he as bad as he’s portrayed or was he just telling people what they wanted to hear in order to get votes? I don’t know, but we’re going to find out in short order. His supporters may ultimately be disappointed in who they elected because at the end of the day, Trump is a pretty good businessman/dealmaker, and any good dealmaker knows that if you have any chance of surviving in the world you choose to live, compromise is critical. He’s already backing off a bit. We’ll see where that goes.

As for Hillary, you’d think she was as pure as the driven snow. Really? Even those who backed her have to admit that it was her own sins that came back to bite her and ultimately cost her the election. There are so many reasons why she lost and quite frankly, Trump is the least of them. If you can’t beat Trump in a Presidential election with the kind of money, experience and pedigree you have stuck in your back pocket, what does that tell you about her? The democrats chose the only person in America who couldn’t beat Trump and that’s their fault. The deal they made with her was cut a long time ago and everyone knows it. Except no one knew or anticipated how badly she would mess up. And even when it all came out, they arrogantly continued to dismiss it and believed people would forget about it. They had no idea that the American public was going to take a page out of the movie, Network, throw open their windows and yell, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

Some people want you to believe there are other underlying reasons why this election went the way it did. Those are the people who are math majors with a concentration on Division. For the most part, I believe this country is better than that.

So the game should be over for now. We have a process that’s fair, though heavily influenced by huge sums of money. It’s time to move on. There have been many times when the person I wanted to win, lost. It bothered me. But when it was over, I wanted that person to succeed,  because there is no other choice. If he doesn’t succeed, everyone loses. The betterment of this country should be more important than our individual differences.
We all have a right to protest within the boundaries of the law. We all have a right to speak our minds and call out and reject our elected officials when we feel they don’t have our best interests at heart.

And that’s exactly what happened here.

Let’s move on.