Presidential Election Results

“Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” President-Elect Donald Trump, with his bombast, is a fitting parallel for the wind, and we’ll just have to wait and see what the whirlwind is. I fear that we’ll see changes that may be steps backward if he tries to do all the things he said he would do in his campaign: filing criminal charges against Hillary Clinton; deportation of illegal Muslims and other Middle-Easterners and curtailing any immigration from Syria and other nations seeking refuge; deportation of illegal Hispanics; repealing the Affordable Health Care Act; appointing an ultra-conservative judge to the Supreme Court in an attempt to overthrow same-sex marriage laws and gain more restrictive anti-abortion laws; building that enormous wall along our entire southern border; curtailing the media and what they can say about him; building close ties with Russia and Vladimir Putin; repealing the Iran Nuclear arms agreement; questioning NATO and our NATO allies; and possibly even “bombing the hell” out of any nation or group that doesn’t line up behind him. He says he’ll lower taxes in Reagan’s failed “trickle down” economic theory; he’ll reduce our deficit; he’ll pour money into strengthening our military; he’ll pour more money into rebuilding our infrastructure; he’ll abandon our current trade agreements and bring back millions of jobs and companies. How will he finance all these things and still lower the deficit? The man has no political or military experience, yet he is the man our nation’s voters have chosen to “Make American great again.” He is the man who controls that frightening button which sends out nuclear missiles and brings on the Apocalypse. Our next president is the living embodiment of that image we had hoped was behind us—the world’s view of us as “Ugly Americans.” I fervently hope that he’ll have sense enough to surround himself with a cabinet of really intelligent and politically knowledgeable people, and I hope that these advisors will keep a muzzle handy for any ill-advised moments when he speaks like the man we saw and heard during the debates and on the campaign trail. Will his cabinet be able to keep him in check if and when he begins ranting? Will he somehow be able to bring us all together to repair our nation’s problems or will he be just one more problem?

This election, just as it did sixteen years ago, has shown us the need to do away with the archaic Electoral College system. Hillary Clinton, just as Al Gore did sixteen years ago, won the popular vote but lost the election because of this outdated system. Our Founding Fathers proposed this system to give states more power to elect our presidents. But they could not have foreseen what our nation and the world would be like nearly two and a half centuries later. Let me give you an example of how unfair this system is. Let’s say I’m a registered Democrat in South Dakota, a state that has always been a GOP stronghold. My vote will have absolutely no meaning or value. I may as well not even vote. The South Dakota three points will go to the GOP nominee no matter what I do. But if the election were decided by the popular vote, my vote would have as much meaning as the vote of any other voter no matter where they lived. More people who voted wanted Hillary Clinton to be our next president than Donald Trump, yet he is our president-elect whether we like it or not.

It will be interesting to see what he will say and do when he takes office. It will be interesting to see what the world economy will be like in 2017. We might be on the edge of not just a deep recession, but a deep depression in all the economies in the world. I hope and pray such doesn’t happen. I hope what we have “sown” isn’t the whirlwind but is instead a bumper crop of peace and prosperity all over the world.