It was 1980. I was a very active Union member being by that time the president of a town’s teachers’ union, and because of that and my working with other Unions to reelect Jimmy Carter and not elect Ronald Reagan, I had been invited to a watch party at the Parker House Hotel in Boston with movers and shakers of the Massachusetts Democrats and the Unions in the state.
Two floors above us were the Republicans cheering on their winning candidate.
There was a lot at stake. We may not have known exactly what he would do, but we were certain it would benefit the wealthy and White, not the rest of us. We did not know it at the time, but we would end up with a president who began the destruction of the middle class by reducing the 1% tax contributions which was claimed to be a good idea if you accepted the hollow promise that, with more money, corporations and investors would create jobs, being crowned “Job Creators” with this becoming the justification for continued benefits showered on them by the federal government while no jobs were created.
The GOP still claims the theory will pay off and has been dangling that dream to its base for close to 40 years.
We would not know, until we saw it, that he would undo much of the environmental programs begun by Carter
We did not know that in playing to his base that he would let Gay men die from AIDS because, well, Jesus.
We did not know exactly what he would do as we stood in the room at the Parker House watching our guy go down.
We just knew it would be bad for the average citizen, but great for the U.S. Nobility.
When the election was called for Reagan and against what was best for working Americans, we were crushed.
A group of Republicans came down to our gathering place and began taunting us while jeering about their win. Their appearance was almost instantaneous with the election call, and, rather than have a moment or two to accept our loss, we were immediately subjected to Neener-Neener abuse brought into our space by winners with nasty us/them attitudes.
Before he even entered the White House, the Reagan Republicans began accusing Bill Clinton of multiple “crimes” to render him impotent as president and justify general opposition. Land deals, murders, sexual dalliances, and more were brought up and investigated for both of his tenures in office, with it all finally coming down to his having lied about getting a blow job in the Oval Office and denying it.
Not only was he impeached, but all this would be used against Hillary Clinton in her run for president and too many people, believing all the debunked charges from the 1990s, boiled down to her inability to keep her husband under control. She would lose to a man who had been divorced twice, married three times, and had cheated on each wife with the successor and bragging about his sexual prowess.
When President Obama got elected, his ascension to the Oval Office was met with effigies lynched and set on fire, claims he wasn’t really a citizen, he was a secret Muslim, his wife was really a man, and reminded it is called the WHITE House for a reason.
It is a matter of record that when Republicans win, they rub that win in their oppositions faces, and if they lose they will, as Mitch McConnell revealed with the election of Obama, do whatever they can to make the Democrat fail.
When Trump got elected and there were huge questions about our getting a man who would become presidential or get the reality TV celebrity who spent much of his time on talk shows praising himself, we were advised to give him a chance.
We did.
We lost.
He made money off his job, intensified racial division, promoted the militarization of the police and militias, gave tax breaks to the rich and corporations, treated Transgender people like dogs, ruined our alliances, cozied up to despots, and, similar to Reagan, dismissed the seriousness of a virus resulting in thousands and thousands of deaths.
Now with the election of Joe Biden, we get both Republican reactions.
Along with Trump preventing a meaningful transition and his acolytes looking for every excuse to prevent his departure, many of his minions in his beloved and adoring militias have already stated that they will not recognize Joe Biden as president.
They might carry guns, get in your face, maskless, call you names, and oppose “political correctness” using names they know are derogatory and demeaning while calling people snowflakes, but their candidate lost, and now it is time for those who opposed him to play nice according to those who are at their worst when they win..
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Former Sen. Rick Santorum pleaded with Democrats to,
“Give his supporters and everybody time to figure this out. This is a very emotional time. Give people space to work through this.”
Be gentle with them in their loss and be gracious and reserved in your feelings of relief that this chapter in our history is over. For their inner peace, don’t trigger them, tread gently as if on eggshells.
We are advised to respect their feelings about Donald Trump losing the election.
No Neener-Neener assaults, no effigies, no criticism, no expressions of joy because the people who called you a “ Libtard Snowflake” need time to deal with their emotions.
Remember Santoro’s comments on marriage equality. He compared marriage equality to bestiality when he was in the Senate and signed a pledge that he
“will not honor any decision by the Supreme Court which will force us to violate a clear biblical understanding of marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman.”
But now, those of us who were his “bestialists” about whom he said the most demeaning things are now being advised to be nicer to Republicans.
Trump “just found out that he’s probably not going to be the president of the United States here. I mean, you can say, ‘Well, it was in the cards,’ but you don’t know until the votes are counted,” Santorum said.
The examples I sited were from over eight years ago, and perhaps in the intervening years the GOP has learned to be gracious in victory and empathetic to those who were lost.
But then you have Republicans like U.S. Congressman-elect Madison Cawthorn’s of North Carolina who upon winning advised his opponent to
“Cry more, lib.”
Republican State Representative in Mississippi tweeted to a fellow Representative that with a Biden win,
““We need to succeed (obviously meant secede which is part of the vaunted Southern Heritage) from the union and form our own country.”
He obviously accepted the vote of the people graciously in his loss.
The staff at Fox News were given a memo to not to refer to Biden as “President-Elect, even as Trump complained on live TV about his feeling that Fox had been unfair to him and had given more air time to Democrats than Republicans.
Many GOPers in DC are refusing to accept the election results, and some, like Lindsey Graham who has called the secretary of State of a state he does not represent to ask for help in suppressing the vote, are working desperately to cancel it.
Jacketless Jim Jordan attempted to frame the Democrats as hypocrites since they revealed they had a problem with Russian interference in the 2016 elections, but seem to object to questions about election integrity when the two things are not the same, and the losers, while claiming there was no integrity to the elections are ecstatic with the number of GOP politicians elected on the same ballots.
Meanwhile among the militias whose feelings we need to respect, Oath Keepers, the country’s largest militia group that has in its ranks former military members, police officers, and first responders Like with the KKK, has declared it will not accept Biden as president, and claims it is not alone.
Its leader has declared, “I think about half this country won’t recognize Biden as legitimate. They won’t recognize this election. What that means is that everything that comes out of his mouth will be considered not of any force or effect, anything he signs into law we won’t recognize as legitimate. We’ll be very much like the founding fathers. We’ll end up nullifying and resisting.”
Although militia groups have been around for years claiming unabridgeable Second Amendment rights, they were attracted to Trump because, not liking the same people, he gave tacit, and at times spoken approval to their racism and otherism and because he avoids facts in favor of impulsive thought, is brash, has a negative attitude toward the media, and does not distance himself from their activities, many of which involve guns and bullying.
They feed off each other.
These are the guys whose feeling, those things they assign to snowflakes, need to be respected.
And, so, here we are in the upper position in the schoolyard being told by the person who daily bullys the weakest among us to be nice to him because he, unlike his victims apparently, has legitimate feelings that must be respected.