Real life sucks. I can tell it to you from a personal
experience. When our cat died several months earlier this year, we had about
two cases left of specialized cat food left behind – for aging cats with kidney
problems. Either we could have thrown them out, or put an ad onto Kijiji and
that would have been the end of that. Instead, we rode downtown to hand them
over to the Toronto Humane Society in person.
Life being what it is, THS DIDN’T accept the cat food,
on account of it being so specialized, but they DID ‘kindly’ offer to throw it
out for us. Since we did not need it anymore, and because we were emotionally
exhausted, we accepted. The food was thrown out regardless of what we did. We
wasted TTC tokens on top of everything else, (and these days they are not
cheap). I hate real life.
And then, on November 8th, Donald Trump was
elected the 45th president of the U.S. Immediately, the Americans
began to look into immigration to Canada, (over here), or to New Zealand (and
Australia?) as soon as this morning (November 9th). The stock market
is having the next bad experience since the British Brexit, too. Life, thanks
for further reinforcing my point!
Do I feel sorry for Hillary and the rest of the
Clintons? Yes. However, earlier this year, I have participated in Canadian
elections, albeit on a municipal level. My family was supporting a Conservative
candidate, (personally, I lean more towards NDP, actually), who is something of
a family friend… Okay.
Our role was fairly small: we put down promotional
posts over the candidate’s neighborhood, and promoted him in there as well. And
at the same time we could see firsthand the ‘chaotic optimism’, cough, that he generated, he and his
aide, (sent by Mr. Harper directly, so we were told). It was a clear case of
counting chickens before they hatched, and it ended in failure – not only for
our friend, but for Mr. Harper too: he lost his job to Mr. Trudeau. The moral?
The same thing had happened to Ms. Clinton.
There is one more thing – the mass media. According to
it, Trump is a racist, misogynist, et cetera, Anti-Christ. Of course, Hillary
is barely better. Thus, at least for SOME people, the LEAST disgusting
candidate won. In the U.S., mass media has acquired excessively too much power
over the lives of people, (including the politicians, maybe). Internet, with
its’ features such as Facebook and Twitter further complicated things – it is
getting next to impossible to figure out of the information is true, false, a
deliberate falsehood or just some person sharing their opinion – and getting
quote-mined. On November 9th, U.S. found itself in a world very
different from the one depicted by its’ mass media where the good guys always
won and/or were Democrats. Now they will have to decide if the Democrats are
good guys but still have lost, or they were never the good guys to begin with,
or if the mass media has lied to them all along all this time. For some people,
it will be tough to adjust, let us be honest.
Anything else? As people are pointing out, life goes
on, even if the Democratic set of values that had been gathering power and
dominance since the 1970s were checked – severely – by Trump’s election. No, no
one is going to secede as it happened after the election of Abe Lincoln – maybe
you remember that man – but the presidential race has torn the American society
apart and putting it back together won’t be easy or simple, even if everyone wanted
to, and probably not everyone does. The democracy is a very powerful political
system, and its power comes from its variability, instability, changeability, and
not everyone likes it, because otherwise Trump would not have been elected, but
he was. Now, for the next 4 to 8 years, (unless something ELSE happens, and not
necessarily for the better), he is the new president of the U.S. Real life
sucks, and it always did.
…Did Hillary have to go the extra mile and lose the
election to bring the point home for all of us, though?
End
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