.
One of the pleasures of publishing the Coltons Point Times is the opportunity to share with you the comments of my readers, the everyday persons working to survive and filling their life with everything they love. A series of post-election analysis will be offered from contributing writers sharing their thoughts on the election.
They are not seasoned journalists but they are dedicated, patriotic Americans. At times it is refreshing to hear honest observations rather than biased news so do not expect to hear from any professional politicians, pollsters, press, or pundits.
I want to thank the contributing writers and hope we can all learn more about each other if we will just take the time to read.
This Contributing Author post is hosted on the Coltons Point Times. Contributor authors control their own work and the views do not reflect those of the Coltons Point Times. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email in the comment section.
Preamble
2016
We the People, in order to form a more
perfect union, have some
serious work to do. We are not, at this
point in history, beset by an occupying external power. Rather, we are dealing with what the business
community calls “disruptive change” because of this presidential election. The foundational fissures have been opening
over the years from the lingering frustration that economic well being remained
out of reach for the vast majority of hard working Americans. They have watched their incomes stagnating
and declining in purchasing power while the corporate profits they delivered
through their hard work continue to flow to those at the very top of the
economic ladder. These pent up
frustrations have vented and found a singular and unusually disruptive
voice. That voice, through the
unexpected co-opting of a major political party, was freely elected into power
by marginally less than a plurality of “We the People” who cared to exercise
their right to vote. This duly elected
voice makes bold promises he guarantees to deliver, apparently through the
messianic force of his being. Those
promises are paired with a corresponding and alarming set of threats to
re-impose the centuries-old restrictions to freedom that our Constitution
explicitly protects against.
Specifically, establishing Justice
and insuring domestic Tranquility may once again be made subject to
determining if one is of a preferred race or religion, potentially subject to
government verification. Our next president has called for racial profiling by
law enforcement. His desire to impose these restrictions was regularly in
evidence as he loudly incited mob rule at his political rallies.
To provide for the common defense
with an all-volunteer military is a bipartisan congressional responsibility of
adequate funding and a militarily strategic matter for the commander-in-chief
to deploy that military in the most responsible manner with declarations of war
approved by congress. Today, we are
taken aback by cavalier talk of nuclear proliferation to our non-nuclear
allies, and, compounding this alarm, by his questioning why we should not
consider actually using our nuclear arsenal.
This recklessness not only jeopardizes our freedoms but our very being.
This seventy-year-old has already lived on
the nuclear precipice in 1962 during the Cuban missile crises as a high school
student in a military academy, certainly not oblivious to that national
existential threat. The entire nation was transfixed on its black and white
televisions at that time to watch President Kennedy’s address on the developing
situation as he cautioned against initiating nuclear war, where the “fruits of
victory would be ashes in our mouth..”
In the White House, the president was counseling with his Joint Chiefs,
some of whom were favoring a strike as they opposed the option of a naval
blockade. I would refer the new
presidential advisers to Robert Kennedy’s memoir, Thirteen Days, where
he recalled:
“One member of
the Joint Chiefs, for example, argued that we could use our nuclear weapons, on
the basis that our adversaries would use theirs against us in an attack.”
Apparently, our president-elect has been
contemplating this dangerous logic based upon the questions he has raised. Robert Kennedy continues his observation:
“I thought, as I listened, of the many times
that I had heard the military take positions which, if wrong, had the advantage
that no one would be around in the end to know.”
As they say, elections have consequences –
God forbid.
The political divide on how we should promote
the general Welfare is foremost in the minds of those who voted for this
celebrity business mogul, trusting that he will help them reach a level of
prosperity they know they deserve but are unable to achieve in the current
political-economic climate. Unfortunately,
for them, his aligned party has consistently stacked the deck against the
average wage earner.
However, by 2008 the middle class and the
poor had already found themselves dealt out of the game for some time. In the forward to his fortieth anniversary
edition of The Affluent Society, economist John Kenneth Galbraith
discussed what might have changed from his 1958 observations with a perspective
of forty years later. On the attitudes
of achieving affluence, he notes:
“Forty
years ago I did not fully foresee the extent to which affluence would come to
be perceived as a matter of deserved personal reward and thus fully available
to the poor, were they only committed to the requisite effort.”
Galbraith’s 1998 observation was just
taking root. Fourteen years later the
2012 GOP convention championed the attitude of affluence equating to personal
and moral worth. Then VP-nominee Paul
Ryan coined the term “hammock of dependency” to demean the initiative of those
still struggling to recover from the Wall Street catastrophe, or who looked to
find a leg up in life.
He insinuated those who were down and out lacked
the dreams for themselves and their children, favoring to live out their lives
in government-subsidized poverty. He
would divide the worthiness of Americans into two classes, “the makers, and the
takers.”
Presidential nominee Mitt Romney put the
nail in his electoral coffin with his infamous “47%” address to wealthy donors,
charging that the lower income group would never accept livelihoods out of
poverty, apart from government aid. Those
nominees that year found new ways to shrink the Republican tent that resulted
in their defeat.
Yet, this “47%” now makes up some of the
electorate throwing their support behind this new outsider and his party, and
they may ultimately find that they have voted against their own best interests. The GOP, again in the Oval Office after eight
years and with continued control of congress, will primarily pursue tax cuts
first before programs to drive growth. This
will continue to put the middle class at the bottom of the heap.
Speaker Ryan’s Medicare and Medicaid restructuring
will first and foremost directly impact senior citizens “by raising
out-of-pocket costs for some and shifting others from traditional Medicare
coverage to commercial insurance”, according to a Forbes magazine article. There has been no disclosure on the amount of
offsetting tax credits seniors might receive, along with ambiguity on many
other details, which is typical for Ryan-authored proposals.
We have yet to see anything from this next
president or his congress that would un-rig this game for the people who put
them into office.
Now the election is over and the vote count
completed. The voters constitutionally
handed the presidency to Trump, the rogue Washington outsider, widely seen as an
ethically and morally challenged demagogue.
The numbers, data, and evidence matters as the results are in and we are
required to accept them.
Just as climate science confirms the trend
of global warming, we, in the global community, largely accept those
results. If a doctor were to diagnose
you with a serious illness, not accepting the result would be foolish. We must accept the results in each of these
cases. However, accepting the results is
not the same as saying these results are acceptable. Illness, climate change, and this election
present long-term outcomes that can trend toward the unacceptable and
potentially on to cataclysmic unless corrective intervention is applied.
So how do we now secure the Blessings
of Liberty for
us and our Posterity, with the promised threats and observed recklessness
this election has delivered? Fortunately,
our Constitution has inherent remedies.
Elections are transient events and no single person or party can fail
outrageously and then continue in power perpetually. However, this election’s outcome also
conclusively indicates a need to address symptoms of national fracturing.
First, the tribalization of our country
has been exacerbated primarily due to the middle class losing out economically. People are becoming less and less
comfortable, not to mention less tolerant, of those not sharing their ethnic
heritage. Cable and Internet “news” media outlets have been the primary
accelerant to tribalization, seeing an opportunity to drive racial animus as a
political tactic against the first African American president.
This was in full force in 2012 with the
current president-elect serving as propagandist-in-chief until Obama was
re-elected. The results of the ensuing
“autopsy” prescribed by the GOP party chairman recommended more outreach to
minorities and more tolerance of the progressive social views of millennials in
order to expand the Republican base.
That recommendation lasted up until the 2016 nomination process where
the nominee, with his characteristic unreserved vitriol, carved up America
into the racial, ethnic, and religious groups to be demonized, monitored, and
otherwise dealt with as his supporters cheered his new xenophobia platform
In the end, the GOP did win the Electoral
College but has now lost the popular vote in six of the last seven elections,
2004 being the lone exception. This election has been characterized as a “white
wash”. Eventually, the concept of a
whites-only firewall to protect Republican candidates is a losing strategy,
especially given the outcome of this latest popular vote. (Yes, maybe Bernie
would have won it all.)
But this tribalization is of no benefit to
any group politically or economically. The entire middle class and those
economically below that line need to unite to challenge the policies that will
continue to be passed by this new president and his party that, as history has
shown, will continue to undercut their well being.
Secondly, civil discourse has devolved
into one-hundred-forty-character road rage.
(Need I point out who champions this method as his favorite form of
retribution? Leadership, anyone?). The cure to our divisions will not occur via
text, or Facebook, or impulsive, angry and anonymous comments on a newspaper
opinion writer’s column. Offering opposing and constructive views without
personal insults might be an approach one would typically use if not separated
from another by the Cloud. We rarely see this in practice, especially in the
political context.
Finally, elections are cyclical, and in
two years will come another opportunity for adjustments. The separation of
powers defined in our constitution might supply sufficient safeguards in the
interim to constrain someone familiar only with unconstrained authority from
acting irresponsibly, but this would not be something we should take on faith.
This nation has been said to be an ongoing
experiment. Had the election results
been as all the polls mistakenly forecast with Hillary emerging as the winner,
then the outcome of that experiment could be easily predicted; we would have
potentially endured four more years of congressional gridlock and ongoing
investigations of the new president in order to render her ineffective and,
perhaps, impeachable.
However, those were not the results and we
have cast ourselves into an unforeseen period of disruption. Now, our current
experiment can potentially result in resetting many of the controls on which we
have historically relied to sustain our national identity as the model of
freedom and democracy, and as the world’s most responsible superpower. By nature, experiments frequently deliver
unexpected outcomes.
If we’re fortunate we may get penicillin.
NASA crashed several unmanned launches before putting Alan Shepard atop a
Redstone rocket. In this case we have
neither a laboratory nor a test launch pad.
This experiment will be done live and in real time. It requires close monitoring and the
readiness for an immediate response if and when things begin to trend toward
the detrimental.
About the author:
Mike Krafka is
a native of Ottumwa, Iowa
and currently resides in the Providence,
Rhode Island area. Mike has a degree in composition from the
Berklee College of Music in Boston, and a
graduate certificate in Business Analytics from Bryant
University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. He has a career
over the past thirty years working primarily in the financial industry as a
technology executive with a speciality in systems capacity management. Mike is
the father of three sons who are musicians and educators in the New York City and Boston
areas.
