Nothing about what the president said at his New York press conference on Tuesday should surprise anyone. He’s been this way from the very beginning. The signs were there, and the people who voted for him, or (sorry, not sorry) voted third party, gave either support, complacency, or indifference to his blatant pattern of bigotry.
If you chose to ignore his bigotry because he was the “lesser of two evils,” or “the shakeup Washington needed,” how effective do you think he can be now? How effective a president was he ever going to be when he simply could not, and cannot represent such a wide swath of this country?
I wanted the president to do well. I didn’t like him. I didn’t vote for him. But there’s no point in wishing he’d fail, because when he fails, we fail. I didn’t think our standing in the world could get any worse after W., but this is so so much worse.
Let this be a lesson to all of us. When it comes to voting, ditch your cynicism and your privilege. We have a responsibility to make the best possible, plausible, logical choices when we head to the ballot box. When you have candidates and proposals that will set us back as a nation as it pertains to civil rights and equality, if you claim to support those things, then prove it, and keep the bigots out of office.
I’m sorry, there was absolutely no way a Jill Stein or Gary Johnson was ever going to win, fortunately or unfortunately, and the vast majority of people who voted for them knew that, but they put their vanity ahead of their country and their neighbor.
James Sullivan
Arkansas
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