I live in southern Minnesota. As the father of three wonderful young adult children, I witnessed a great deal of shock, concern and outright fear from them after the results of the election became clear.
My daughter is a sophomore at Hamline University, majoring in elementary education and psychology and well on her way to becoming a fourth-generation teacher of children. My older son, her twin brother, is a young gay man happy to get out of our small town and immerse himself in the culture and diversity of the big city, where he studies art at Macalester College. And our younger son is a senior in high school, deeply involved in our community already yet in the process of determining where he will go off to study in less than a year.
So I decided I had to reach out to them with some thoughts.
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Dear ______, ______ and ______:
I know you've all been very concerned about the consequences of the results of the election, and I'd like to say some words about that.
First, let's be blunt. There should be no sugar-coating of things. This election outcome is an unmitigated disaster. Alongside the forty-three people who have served as President up to this point in our history, Donald Trump stands as unique in his manifest unqualification for the office. No one with his lack of appropriate experience and possessed of his severely flawed temperament should ever enter the Oval Office except as a visitor. But America has weathered many storms as severe as this one. Nixon, and Watergate. Jim Crow. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. The Second World War. The Great Depression. The profound economic dysfunction of the Gilded Age. Slavery and the Civil War. We as a nation have faced greater trials in our collective past than will be presented by the Trump Presidency. This is not to diminish what looms ahead but we must keep things in perspective.
I believe that it is important to understand that this development is not merely about Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The GOP certainly failed in its role as a gatekeeper to prevent the likes of Trump from reaching the general election ballot. But we are not Republicans. We are not conservatives. And we cannot rely on the Republican Party to do what is right. We must worry about keeping our own house in order. So let's continue with the honesty. The Democratic Party lost a winnable election. Hillary Clinton blew a contest that she should have won. She was not beaten; she lost. All of the conservative misdeeds, all of their unfair tactics and vile practices and barely-veiled racism and sexism do not change that fact. The Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton failed. I am not simply pointing fingers at others here. I was a Clinton supporter all through this cycle. As such, I helped enable this electoral debacle and I take responsibility for that. We need not wallow in our failures. But we must recognize them so we can move forward with clarity.
The short term certainly looks unpleasant. But the future is a liberal future. It always has been. Such is the nature of liberalism and conservatism and indeed of humanity itself. Liberalism moves forward. Conservatism seeks to obstruct that movement. It can impede progress but it cannot prevent it in the long run. At any given year in this nation's history, society has always been more liberal than it was fifty years prior. It is almost always more liberal than it was a generation before and usually more liberal than a decade past. Such is progress. Three steps forward, two steps back. Never forget that. Just because American society stumbles, or slips a rung or two down the ladder of progress, does not mean that it cannot get back on its feet and continue the climb. It will.
There will be elections to come. In two years we must work to elect those who will stand up to Trump and his allies. They must be individuals who embrace our values and who possess the means to win elections and then codify those values in policy and law. In 2018 there will be Congressional elections. Amy Klobuchar's second term in the Senate will be ending and there will be another election for her seat, whether or not she seeks a third term. There will be an open gubernatorial election as Governor Dayton retires. Time never stops. New opportunities are always approaching.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
I love you all. Stay strong and optimistic!
Love,
Dad