My first foray into politics did not quite yield the desired results (I obviously don't have a strong swing state readership), but it was unreasonable to think it would or could.
With my disappointment over the Presidential election results, I find myself challenged by uncertainty in a way which is not unfamiliar to me but which I must approach with the same conscious and conscientious attitude I have lived every day of my life for the past six years. I single out that timeframe for the simple reason that since my stroke I have to be very planful about how I expend my extremely-limited focus and energy.
Yes, I'm disappointed in the message our country has sent itself and the world in terms of angry, fear-mongering rhetoric. But I'm still willing to accept the election results and see which Donald Trump shows up for work. I will not protest his presidency unless he tries to follow through on the hateful promises he made to sell himself as a candidate of change.
I can't back the #NotMyPresident movement, because it is just as rigid as the fear Clinton supporters had that Trump and his supporters would not accept the results of the election had he lost.
Acceptance is by no means easy. It's taken me many years to recognize that acceptance of my particular situation isn't the same as surrendering to it. As a brain injury friend reminds me whenever I bring it up, "surrenders are negotiated". Surrender is not the same as acquiescence. So, no, I'm not happy about the state of the nation, but it does me and no one else any good to assume the worst and unnecessarily expend energy railing against hypotheticals. We'll need our strength to remain vigilant and confront the realities of the world. As I learned from a Walt Whitman quote on an ex-girlfriend's Body Shop t-shirt: ...re-examine all you have been told ..., dismiss whatever insults your own soul....
We will get through this as long as we choose to stand by our core values and stop suspiciously eyeing each other through pinhole camera lenses.
My favorite punctuation mark is the semicolon. And it's an apt metaphor for recent years of my life: it's more than a comma pause, not quite a period stop; it usually appears in the middle of a sentence; no one quite knows how to use it properly; it's a sigh of contemplation; a knowing wink; an upward glance of reflection.
Saturday, November 19, 2016
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