Alternate Universes and how to survive them

It’s been an interesting week of putting on what was only ever meant to be my faux-minister uniform, the mental arch support of those that run tangent to me.  It is the thing about the electoral college that has driven me crazy since my first vote for a presidential election in 1980 when I cast my ballot for John Anderson, passionately, knowing at 18 both that living in Tennessee largely would cause my individual proclamation meaningless in what has become a bloodbath of republican red.

Okay, not a bloodbath, but I liked the literary illusion.

Anyway, it is the weirdness of working around Ph.D.’s in the biological sciences, and by extension many of the master’s degreed administrative support accountants and project managers that within this state so mired in this party that the democrats don’t waste a dime traveling here – poor investment of campaign dollars after a losing cause.  I’ve never understood in the modern age when it’s unnecessary to rely on the few rich guys in town to travel and cast a cumulative ballot (at their choosing) on behalf of a gaggle of us – it’s not really up to the dudes who own horses and buggies in the modern age.  It is inherently un-American in the manner most American’s expect things to be representative that a person in Ohio has more influence than myself.

And in this island of quasi-intellectuals people have migrated to me since Wednesday at work, often under the guise of some random question or seeking of my near two decades of expertise that could easily have been relayed by email or phone, because they are internally afloat, distraught, simply lost.

I try to explain to them that, thing is, though, until it is changed – these are the rules.  I, personally, think the protests ridiculous and disingenuous.   Had she won by electoral votes, and lost the popular vote, I am somewhat certain those same people carrying “not my president” signs would NOT have said, “Oh, dudes and dudettes, although we technically won, he got the most people voting for him so she should really just concede to him and to the will of the people.”

So I find those people, emotionally devastated as they may be, full of shit.  It is what it is, horrible as it is- and anything but acceptance of the valid results is itself a blatant slap in the face of the very democracy you claim to be so enamored to own.  For my co-workers, who have not done more (that they’ve mentioned) than hosting Move-On living room grief sessions with talk of digging in and spreading the word in the mid-terms and beyond. Without my having mentioned necessarily my political leanings, which as an accountant and middle management old guard might be reasonably uncertain, has been nothing but assumed by everyone that I was not on the winning side.

And here’s one thing that makes me smile:  that people who’ve come to know me through interactions and my specific calls to action within our organization’s hierarchy and implementations, that people think of me as a reasonable, fair, liberal and even libertarian leaning. It’s nice when people “get you” inherently.

But I also say to them that we’ll survive it.  To a fairly similar degree, I felt this way when Gore congratulated George W.  The reason I voted for Gore, by the way, is often what leads my ballot box:  I’d prefer to have the more intelligent person behind the steering wheel, even if I often disagree with them.  But Gore, what I loved about his was that he didn’t just study or cruise briefings on issues or complexities – he’d research them exhaustively and write a fucking book. And that’s the part I found myself trying to ease people through this week, the reality that we had a pretty stupid guy in charge for 8 years prior to Barrack, so we’ll just hang our heads, improve our local small worlds and the lives we individually touch as best we can amid what we can daily tolerate, and the time will actually fly by, at least for old assholes like me.

One former employee of mine, who I guided and trained to become my peer in title/position had sent me an email that became a string between us because she felt horrible she’d not done more to prevent this outcome, how she had voted but with the recent birth of a child that’s had a few medical issues, and having been promoted to the overwhelming role that is our now equal jobs in different departments, she’d just failed her ideals and beliefs.  Although she’s never admitted so to me, nor I to her having been her boss historically, that she’d told her husband that they maybe needed to move to Colorado or someplace where marijuana was legal because she needed to enter an alternate universe to escape this nightmare.  I replied that I’d taken a different approach and asked my guy if he could find some strong smoke that would hurl me back to real reality because I was pretty sure she and I had landed in the alternate reality.

I’ve also shared with her this one silver lining, the only one I can thus far find:

We have this generic thing that presumably people tell their kids, that if you try hard enough, anyone can be president.  I’d heard an interesting fact on NPR that makes sense, but which I never conceptualized before, that prior to the current president-elect, no one has ever been president that wasn’t either in the military and/or a politician.  And, you know, the majority of Americans have not been in the military (that’s like, what, 1.5% of the population or something?), and certainly far fewer have been elected to political positions.  And I’ve, personally, never been in the military and vehemently avoided even the outside chance of being drafted. And, really, I’ve never thought about being a politician.

So, we do walk away with this one consolation, that we no longer are in the position of lying to our offspring or students when we suggest to them that they might grow up to lead this country, and we can proclaim this to our deepest convictions because we’ve seen it happen in our lifetimes.

It is true that any asshole can be elected president.  Absolutely anyone.