The election of Donald Trump has shown us much about how some people behave when they lose. Immature participation-trophy brats cannot fathom the possibility of losing. The right to assemble and voice our concerns about government, and the people in it, is enshrined in our Constitution, but what we have seen since the election hardly passes as legitimate protest.
There is violence - one protester has shot another, and Trump supporters are shown on video being pulled from their cars and beaten. This is disgusting. Perhaps these petulant babies need "space to destroy" as the rioters in Baltimore were given by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake? No, this idea is foolish and will cost innocents their lives and more business owners their livelihoods.
To the roughly half of Americans who didn’t vote for Donald Trump, welcome to adulthood; you don’t always get what you want. But what can come of this is recognition of what the other half of the country experienced eight years ago: Losing isn’t fun. Now, instead of spending precious time rioting in the streets, how about acknowledging that the result of this election is a repudiation of the left?
Once in power, Democrats went too far, mistaking two consecutive elections of President Obama as a mandate to move the country into the hard left. Through an executive order, they forced public schools to allow teenage boys into shower rooms and locker rooms with girls, attacked religious freedom, used the EPA to bludgeon the coal industry (which is the source of 88 percent of the energy used by Missourians), offered no definitive plan to fight ISIS successfully, and refused to acknowledge the concerns of Americans about the influx of refugees.
Let’s also consider the utter failure of the Affordable Care Act, the forced social experimentation on our military, the wide-open southern border, and federal spending like drunken sailors on weekend leave.
Also of note is the repetitive slander of good, honest, kindhearted people on the right as racists. John McCain was a racist, and Mitt Romney was a racist who hated women, so when the same brush was used against Trump, it barely registered with roughly half of the country. If you don’t like a person's ideas or policies, simply crying racism or sexism will no longer work.
Our trade policy was another sore point for millions of working class Americans, who looked around and assessed the disaster that has befallen them only to realize that both parties were equally at fault. Small towns across America have suffered greatly as factories were outsourced and no viable replacement jobs were brought in. Companies moved jobs without a second glance at the devastation that ensued. After decades of this slow tumult, the only one who seemed to care was Donald Trump; so they went with him, warts and all.
Americans took a chance on a flawed candidate because a continuation of the left’s march into socialism would be disastrous for America. It didn’t help that Hillary Clinton has shown herself to be a power-hungry access peddler who’s was bent on regaining access to the White House only to enrich herself. Clinton’s refusal to be held accountable for Benghazi, email-gate, and the pay-for-play at her Clinton Foundation only exacerbated her woes. It turns out Americans really do care if you obstruct justice and lie about it.
In conclusion, stop whining about what to tell your kids about the election. Children get their values from their parents, not the president of the United States. Keep loving them, listening to them, sharing your feelings and time, telling the truth, and giving them your undivided attention, and the next four years will fly by. I know this because that’s what we did for the past eight years under the Obama administration.
No matter what, this is still America -- the freest place on earth. Burning private property to express your anger toward the election results won’t bring us together. It’s time to accept the result and move forward.
(This blog first appeared on Urban Family Communications here: http://www.urbanfamilytalk.com/articles/politics/2016/december/05/hey-americans-on-the-left-you-don-t-always-get-what-you-want/)
