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My nephew Randy stopped by on Wednesday, the day after the election, and joked that now that Donald Trump was elected I'd have plenty of blog material for the next four, maybe eight years. But I told him no, that I wanted Donald Trump to be a good successful president for all our sakes. I told him that I had less-than-zero desire of becoming a professional Donald trump critic and that I hope I don't have to be. In truth, turning into a daily Jeremiah would surely grind down my spirit. In truth I don't even want to write about politics all for a while. I want to think and write about other things for a while. Some happy, uplifting things would be nice. And yet here we are, only three days after Donald Trump's election and already reports of violence and intimidation against Muslims, Hispanics, people of color and members of the LGBTQ community have made the news. Yesterday in Royal Oak, Michigan a group of white middle school students chanted "Build The Wall! Build The Wall!" in the school lunch room. Also in the days following the election:
A man came up behind a student at San Jose State University yanked off her head scarf, then quickly ran off. A high school student in Redding, California, posted an online video of himself handing letters with the word "deportation" written across the top to students of color. The student said he thought the video was funny.
And the Ku Klux Klan has announced that it will hold a 'victory parade' in North Carolina in December because, according to the headline of the Klan's website, "Trump's race united my people."  And these are only some of the stories that have made the news so far. I ran into the mother of one of my piano students in Kroger's yesterday afternoon and she told me with a worried expression that in her child's school a white youngster told a black youngster that now she was going to have to start sitting on the back of the bus. The white youngster thought this was a funny joke. The black youngster not so much. President-elect Trump, you've announced that upon taking office your first priority would be health care, second would be immigration, and third would be jobs. But I'm telling you that you need to re-designate those priorities to second, third and fourth place, and make your first priority stopping the new hatefulness that, let's be honest, your nasty campaign rhetoric has wrought. But you can't even wait until you take over the Oval Office to do this. This is an urgent situation that is already out of control, and you need to handle it right now, today. You need to make an immediate national appearance and in strong words call for an end to the vicious insults, harassment and attacks against Muslims, Hispanics, and others of foreign background or descent, people of color and members of the LGBTQ community by persons who call themselves your followers and who now feel empowered by your victory to persecute others. You must insist that you do not stand for or condone such behavior, that you are not on the side of persons who commit such behavior, that you and your supporters condemn it and that you and your supporters stand firm against racism and bigotry. You must denounce the Ku Klux Klan and warn them not to dare to use your name in a victory parade because you are not, not, not, any ally of theirs. You must reiterate over and over the message of your victory speech that it's time for us to come together as one united people and work together, Americans of all races, religions, and backgrounds - and include here genders and orientations - to unify our great country. You must assure all Americans,
   ...you must assure us all that, contrary to what some people in this country might believe today, you will be a great civil rights president. And then be one. References:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/us/post-election-hate-crimes-and-fears-trnd/index.html http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-updates-trail-guide-kkk-trump-north-carolina-1478822255-htmlstory.html
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On Tuesday night I went to bed late, as probably did most of the country, knowing that Donald Trump would be our new president. I slept very little - an hour at most, I think - but spent most of the night tossing and turning in a weird numb state of not so much disappointment or depression as disorientation, feeling as if I'd been thrust into a topsy-turvy reality where things were not at all what they'd seemed. But when I dragged out of bed at 6:30 am - there was no use to stay in bed any longer, I couldn't sleep anyway - and turned on the news and heard a snippet of Donald Trump's victory speech, I felt a ray of hope: far from the vengeful bombast he typically spouted at his campaign rallies, his words yesterday morning sounded conciliatory. He acknowledged Hillary Clinton as a hard worker and thanked her for her service to our country. Hillary later in her concession speech offered to help the President-elect in any way she could. Hearing this did my heart good. Donald Trump also expressed in his victory speech a desire to reach out to all Americans, to seek help and guidance from us all, and to unite us all, Democrats and Republicans, people of all religions, races, backgrounds and beliefs. And though the words of his speech were only words, and totally out of character from Donald Trump's public persona at that, still I found those word a comfort and a reason for hope that, who knows, maybe Donald Trump is facing a moment of truth and epiphany. Maybe he actually will seek to pull us all back together even after he's spent the past year driving us apart. And so, following the counsel of Hillary Clinton in her gracious concession speech, I intend to offer Donald Trump an open mind. I intend to do this in spite of all the dreadful things he's said and done in the past and in spite of my own harsh criticism of him and my many hours of labor in the effort to keep him from being elected. Because the thing is, elected he was. And I can either beat my head against the wall or accept it, hope for the best, and wait and see. And this only fair, I think, because Donald Trump's surprise victory apparently came from a massive and obviously under-polled demographic in this country: white non-college educated people; people for whom the skilled jobs have disappeared; people who've not only lost their economic security but along with it their sense of place and purpose in a demographically shifting society; people who have been feeling disenfranchised at best, hopeless at worst. They've felt voiceless and desperate, how voiceless and desperate we didn't understand until they rose up like a sleeping giant on election day and showed that they were willing to overlook Donald Trump's gargantuan iniquities just to have the voice they believe he's given them. And so here's what I hope. I hope that the people who elected Donald Trump president are now feeling a new hope and optimism and that this will translate into good feelings about themselves and those around them, whatever the race, religion, ethnicity or gender orientation of those around them happens to be. I hope that Donald Trump will continue to emphasize the message that was at the heart of his victory speech, that we are a diverse country and that we need to come together now. I hope that he will work, as he promised to do in that speech, to bind the wounds of division among us. I hope that he will succeed in bringing back jobs and that he will in fact , "fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. ...rebuild our infrastructure...and put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it". I hope he will work well with other world leaders, many of whom have already stepped forward and expressed a willingness to work with him. I hope that today will be a fresh start for Donald Trump and for us all.   It's 6:03 pm on Election night. It'll be a couple more hours before the results start slowly rolling in, at which time I'll be glued to the TV screen until we have a new President, or rather until the election results are in,
But even if he does that, well, it's okay, I believe it will all get sorted out soon enough. But in the meantime my inner cat is pacing the floor of my brain. Like many of my fellow countrymen and women, I've felt at loose ends since I woke up this morning, and so I've been filling the hours with yoga class, work, necessary and contrived to-dos,
And all day long I've been checking and re-checking the Fivethirtyeight website, my election prognosticator of choice (see post from 10/10/2016), even though the final election stats were given at 10 am this morning.
I want to share my rumination with my hubby Tom but he's out volunteering, or I want to share with one of my children or my sister but they're all either at work at the moment or out of the country.
...and for the past few days they've been traveling the Amazon where there's no wifi or cell reception. Chances are they won't know who won for days. Mayhaps they're lucky for having missed the last crazy days of this crazy election.
So here I sit, alone in the house - even the cat is out - not exactly in a state of worried anxiety, but not fully in a state of happy anticipation, either. I think I'm feeling like a kid on Christmas Eve who knows there's a chance that Christmas might not come. But who also knows that it might.  In an article in yesterday's New York Times the editorial board imagines America on November 9 and poses a question for the future: "In 2016 we were closer than ever to electing an ignorant and reckless tyrant — what did you do to stop him?" This question is one that I've been asking myself - at first in the future tense, currently in the present tense - since last June when Donald Trump mind-bogglingly won the Republican primary race over 17 other opponents, every one of whom would have been a saner choice for a Presidential candidate. And whatever we wake up to in this country on November 9, I want to be able to tell myself that, however effective or ineffective my own tiny grain-of-sand effort has been in the vastness of this election, I did what I could to keep Donald Trump's greedy, groping, out-of-control, hatred-sowing, crazy hands off our country.
I've been doing this not because I love walking up and down the street knocking on strangers' doors - I don't love doing it, in fact it makes me anxious, that is to say, more anxious than I usually am - but because I love my country. And I love my children. And my grand children. And my friends. And their children. And my planet. And so I make myself do it. I've recruited friends to volunteer for Hillary Clinton. I've given the Hillary campaign money. I seek to hearten fellow Hillary supporters or people who, rightly so, just fear Trump,
But the most important thing I can do, the most important thing all of us can do, in truth the one and only meaningful thing any of us can do is to stop Trump is to use the power of our vote. This I've already done. But now I'm doing one more thing. I'm writing this post, pleading my case to every American who reads this against using your vote to give the most powerful office on the planet
President Obama recently said that entering the Oval Office doesn't change a person. Rather it amplifies who one is, magnifies who one is, shows who one is. The bigotry and racism Donald Trump has preached since he's held the national stage has promoted the rise in our schools of a phenomenon which is being called The Trump Effect. Children and teen-agers are using Trump's words - called "Trump Talk" - to harass and bully Hispanic, Muslim, and African American children, children of color in general. "Build That Wall!", " and "Trump is gonna throw your butt over that wall!" have become popular taunts against Hispanic youngsters, while Muslim children are accused by their classmates of being terrorists or ISIS and taunted that they're going to be banned. An article in Rolling Stone entitled "The Trump Effect: How Hateful Rhetoric Is Affecting America's Children" observed that "It's almost like children are learning new ways to hurt each other." But whatever harm Donald Trump has done and would continue to do to our children, our society, our economy, our country's standing in the world, none of that compares to the danger we will be in if Donald Trump gets his hands on our nuclear weapons. His cavalier prattle about "blowing them out of the water", about how he might use nuclear weapons, about asking why we make them if we wouldn't use them, about not ruling out using nukes (as he likes to call them) even on Europe, all that is far too much loose, irresponsible talk about nuclear weapons, talk that should never have been tossed about by anyone in a potential position to use those weapons, least of all a candidate for President of the United States. As President Obama also recently said, when a person makes threats, what will happen when he has the power to carry out those threats? Consider this: The news came out yesterday that Donald Trump’s staff took his access to his Twitter account away from him, and he let them because even he knows he can’t control himself. What if it was our nuclear arsenal his impulsive fingers were hovering over? What if this man, who’s talked about putting together a superPAC after the election to exact vengeance on his enemies, woke up at 3 am seething with rage over some slight real or imagined perpetrated against him by a foreign country? No one could stop him from starting a nuclear attack, not Congress, not the Supreme Court, not the whole U.S. military, not unless every member of every team at every nuclear launch site in the country mutinied. When the United States dropped hydrogen bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 we were the only country on the planet who possessed such weapons of mass destruction. This is no longer true. There are over 16,000 nuclear bombs possessed by 9 countries. And only 10 super-nuke warheads would be sufficient to destroy the planet. And if there’s a nuclear war, then nothing else will matter, not what the Supreme Court rules, not jobs, not the infrastructure, not social justice, not our religious beliefs or partisan politics or opinions on anything. If there’s a nuclear war then it’s game over.
...but because of the residual radioactive fallout that would poison the air and subsequently surviving plants, animals and humans. Neither radiation sickness nor starvation are good ways to die. Please use your power tomorrow to stop Donald Trump. References: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/imagining-america-on-nov-9.html?ribbon-ad-idx=7&src=trending&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Trending&pgtype http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-donald-trump-aides-took-away-candidates-twitter-access/ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-trump-effect-how-hateful-rhetoric-is-affecting-children-w448515 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/06/the-frightening-effect-of-trump-talk-on-americas-schools/ http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-many-super-nukes-it-would-take-to-destroy-the-world-2014-12 At my house we eat a lot of yogurt.
I don't, not because I dislike yogurt, it's just that yogurt doesn't often fit into my normal daily eating schematic of cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, dinner for dinner,
My main problem with yogurt has always been that it's not yummy enough to be dessert nor serious enough to be a meal. However, even though I don't eat much yogurt, as I do the food shopping I do buy a lot of yogurt. Now, though there are probably a dozen brands of yogurt on the supermarket shelf I've always just bought the cheapest brand - either the store brand or whatever's on sale. But no longer.
This is likewise fine with Tom, as he wishes from now on to consume no brand of yogurt other than Chobani. Tom and I came to our Chobani agreement this past Tuesday morning after reading an article in the business section of Tuesday's New York Times about Hamdi Ulukaya, the owner of Chobani.
Hamdi Ulukaya is a Turkish immigrant of Kurdish descent who arrived in upstate New York in the 1990's. Several years later he started a business in New Berlin, New York, selling feta cheese that he made from a family recipe. A few years after that he bought a defunct yogurt factory and in 2007 he began selling his own brand of yogurt, which he called Chobani, derived from the Turkish word for "shepherd". Mr. Ulukaya decided to hire some workers from a local refugee resettlement center and, according to the Times article, "Mr. Ulukaya provided transportation for the new hires, and he brought in translators to assist them. He paid the refugee workers salaries above the minimum wage, as he did other workers at the factory." When Hamdi Ulukaya opened a second Chobani factory in 2012 in Twin Falls, Idaho, he once again went to a refugee resettlement center to hire workers, wishing to pay back this own opportunity in this country, for, as Mr. Ulukaya has said, "The minute a refugee has a job, that’s the minute they stop being a refugee,” Today Chobani is a billion dollar industry that employs 2,000 workers, 300 of them resettled refugees from The Middle East and Africa. Last year, Mr. Ulukaya signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away a majority of his fortune to assist refugees. He recently gave away 10 % of his company's shares to his employees. All his employees receive paid parental leave.
Last year Mr. Ulukaya founded the Tent Foundation, whose mission, according to the Times article, is to help other companies "learn how to effectively integrate refugees into a work force", and which has resulted in pledges from a number of corporations, including Cisco, IBM and Salesforce, to assist refugees. And Hamdi Ulukaya is currently the target of a hate campaign. Last April a far-right website called WND published a story about him entitled "American Yogurt Tycoon Vows to Choke U.S. With Muslims". Then over the summer Breitbart, the extreme-right news outlet formerly run by Donald Trump's campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon,
...began a smear operation against Chobani, publishing misleading articles which spawned a barrage of online internet attacks against Ulukaya and Chobani, including mean Twitter tweets such as: "Be sure you boycott Chobani Yogurt! That Muzzie that owns it is hell bent on filling Idaho with Muslims," and a truly ugly anti-Muslim Boycott Chobani Facebook page - if you're in the mood to look at something despicable here's the link, but make sure you look at it on an empty stomach: https://www.facebook.com/Boycott-Chobani-1305015739514679/ This hate crusade has included death threats against Ulukaya and Twin Falls Mayor Shawn Barigar, a stauch supporter of Ulukaya and the city's Chobani factory. I've always told my children,
...that you can't control what other people do, you can only control what you do.
References:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/business/for-helping-immigrants-chobanis-founder-draws-threats.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chobani http://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/chobani-founder-gets-threats-calls-boycott-employing-refugees-n676776 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/02/the-disgusting-breitbart-smear-campaign-against-the-immigrant-owner-of-chobani.html On Tuesday afternoon I rescheduled my piano students, and headed out to the campus of Capital University in Bexley, an urban suburb of Columbus,  ...to hear President Obama,
 Though the rally wasn't scheduled to begin until 4:30 pm, because of the expected crowd those attending the rally were advised to show up by the time the doors opened at 2:30 pm. So I did. Or tried to. But by the time I arrived around 2:15 the neighborhood around Capital was already parked up and even streets far from the campus were already lined with cars and filled crowds of people walking towards the campus. So I parked even farther, about 3/4 of a mile away and joined the crowd.  As we approached the sports complex the path was lined with vendors of campaign items,   ...and full of young, enthusiastic Hillary volunteers seeking to recruit more Get-Out-The-Vote volunteers,   ...and some vocal Right-To-Life protesters, to whom I felt like suggesting that if the saving of unborn children was really the most important issue, then instead of shouting and hoisting gross posters they might consider lobbying for policies such as free birth-control,  ...public healthcare for pregnant women and children, sufficient maternity leave for new mothers, and accessibility to childcare to name a few. To the crowd made up of many African Americans, one of the Pro-Life protesters kept shouting over and over again into his microphone that anyone who believed that slavery was wrong wouldn't be voting for Hillary because she was pro-slavery, abortion being the worst form of slavery. An dim-witted maneuver at best, thought I. But of course I didn't say anything. What good does arguing do? Nobody changes their minds.
 ...until we reached the entrance, where we passed through security.  It was 3 pm when I finally staked out my spot on the floor of the arena, which would soon be packed with 5,800 people,  
 The atmosphere was festive, the crowd upbeat and excited. At 4:30 the program began with half-a-dozen opening speakers: a young Hillary field organizer, the mayor of Bexley, several candidates running for local offices, and former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, who's running for the Senate against incumbent Republican Senator Rob Portman.  It was close to 6 pm when President Obama finally arrived. The roar was deafening when he stepped out onto the stage, and the auditorium became a sea of floating cell phones and ipads.  Though the crowd had been on our feet for 3 1/2 hours or more, we were all alive with enthusiasm and joy for being in this place together, part of this moment, this close to our President .
 ,...but I didn't care, I just wanted to hear his voice. President Obama spoke eloquently, as he always does, with wisdom and plenty of humor, at one point talking about the World Series between The Chicago Cubs and The Clevelad Indians, reminding us that if we had time to pick up one of the free tacos that Taco Bell was giving away because Cleveland's Francisco Lindor stole a base in the World Series, then we had time to go vote. Make it a combo, he said, get your taco then vote, nourish your body and your soul. When he spoke of Donald Trump and the crowd erupted into boos Obama chided us not to boo, but to vote instead. He continued to remind us whenever necessary to stop booing, that booing doesn't help, voting does. Obama spoke of many issues and ideas, but my favorite moment occurred when a man close to the front pulled out and doffed a "Make America Great Hat" and shouted support for Trump. Once again Obama chided us not to boo and welcomed the Trump supporter. Obama then spoke to the man, saying that he looked like a nice guy with a nice smile, asking him if he really wanted for president a person who disrespected women, who called women pigs, slobs, and worse, who cheated workers, who defrauded students, who wanted to ban a whole religion. The President also assured the Trump supporter that he should not delude himself that Trump would change his ways if elected President. "Who you are, what you are does not change once you occupy the Oval Office," Obama said. "The only thing this does is it amplifies who you are. It magnifies who you are. It shows who you are." Hence if a man disrespected women before he was elected he would still disrespect women when he was president. If he tolerated Klan supporters before, he would still tolerate them as President. And Obama posed the question to the Trump supporter that if a person made threats before he was elected, what would he do once he had the power to carry out those threats? Obama warned that we can't make what Trump says the new normal. The President went on to talk about Hillary Clinton and how it was working with her as Secretary of State, how capable she was, how she never complained, what a prolific worker she was, how she always knew what she was doing, how working with her made him a better president. Through his words one could actually visualize he and Hillary, two real human beings, working together, talking together. The President admitted that Hillary Clinton has made mistakes, that he's made mistakes, that one can't spend many years in public service without making some mistakes, but that Hillary Clinton is a fundamentally good and decent person whose heart is always in the right place and who believes in doing all the good you can for all the people you can for as long as you can. He also pointed out that Hillary is consistently treated differently than any other candidate has ever been treated and he credited this treatment to her being a woman. He then spoke to the men in the audience, pointing out that when a man is ambitious and works hard we we think it's a good thing, but when a woman does the same it can be a little hard to accept and we wonder, "what does she want to do that for?" He said that a lot of the problem is just not being able to get used to the idea of a woman being President. President Obama closed by sharing with us how his love for our country has grown over all the years that he's served as President. "You do this for a while," he said, "and your love for your country grows and grows." He told us that if we believe in this country we cannot be cynical, and so he urged us not to be cynical, to reject mean-spiritedness and divisiveness, to instead choose progress over the next four years, the next eight years, the next twelve years. He said that being a citizen gives each of us power, and he warned us not to give away our power. Finally, he reminded us that we have the chance to make history and not to let it slip away. His final words were, "Choose hope! Vote! God Bless You Ohio, I love you!" And we loved him back.  |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY 
"Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio 
Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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