Message not received

After watching 12 hours of Oliver Stone’s U.S. History: The Untold Story, remaining vestiges of my political naiveté have vanished.

It showed Dwight Eisenhower expanding the military-industrial complex of the U.S. while warning about its dangers; Lyndon Johnson pummeling Vietnam into horrific devastation; Ronald Reagan and the Iran-Contra Affair; George H.W. Bush and the invasion of Panama, which presaged the Gulf War; and his son W., whose ill-fated pursuit of empire began in Iraq with a planned-for ending being the conquest of Iran. Our history is darkened with those in the highest positions of authority acting independently of the governed, pursuing “winning” through quests for power or financial gain, often using threats of nuclear weapons as implied or explicit deterrents for “enemies,” regardless of the consequences to their own and the world’s citizenry.

The U.S. should not be indiscriminately proud of its military legacy, despite having more bully and bombs than other countries—both of which the newly elected president may utilize.

While many of our newly inaugurated president’s supporters seem to yearn to return to a white America, sans immigrants, sans opinionated and educated women, sans people of color, perhaps some supporters felt a disconnect, a dissociation from productivity and opportunity that can occur when government acts negligently toward the governed—as it has done for decades. Neither political party seems to have heard these voices. Both pursued their own agendas, one often simply obstructing, disregarding the needs of the country’s citizens (Republicans), and the other abandoning its core values, so enchanted with providing for every possible individual exception that its base died on the vine (Democrats).

The reality is this: Through the Electoral College, this country has elected as its president a pathological liar, a race-baiting misogynist, a thin-skinned, insecure, non-book-reading opportunist without core values. Shamefully, the legitimate message of some aggrieved citizens was not heard before such a dangerous result occurred. There can be no buyer’s remorse. There can also be no normalizing of the unconscionable. What there can be is resistance.