Tonight I’m remembering Election Day four years ago. Nov. 8, 2016. My bride and I had flown back to Indiana from visiting family and friends in Washington State the day before. Throughout election season, I was pretty confident Hillary was going to win in a landslide. How could it be otherwise? Donald Trump had shown us all who he was, again and again and again. Surely, with all that we knew, most people couldn’t actually vote for him, right? There were some little signs in the last few weeks that maybe it wouldn’t be as much of a beatdown as I thought, first and foremost being the infamous Comey news conference. But, even as I awoke on Election Day, I wasn’t terribly worried. So the win wouldn’t be as epic, but a win was still a win. I was still holding my optimism around noontime when I began to see that exit polling wasn’t going exactly as planned. No matter, good would still prevail. When the polls closed at 8 PM, I was at my computer, ready to check returns as they came in. And then…Hillary’s expected lead wasn’t materializing. In fact, she was running behind, at least in the electoral college numbers. And then…it did not change. I think it was around 11 PM, when the polls closed on the West Coast, that I figured out the unthinkable had happened. At that point the bottom dropped out of my stomach. What? How? How did this happen? How could this happen? This was one of the first times my faith in the basic goodness of people was truly shaken. Many of my friends, no doubt trying to be helpful, told me not to panic, there were checks and balances, Congress would rein him in, nobody would let him run roughshod, etc. We all know how that turned out. Now we find ourselves staring down the barrel of another Election Day, seven days from now. I hope, and I pray, it won’t be an instant replay of four years ago.
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