Merely Me?

I followed the 2016 Campaign with real interest. Unlike many other Americans, I was satisfied with the results, and the promise of some decisiveness coming to Washington, DC after years of deadlock. I still feel I could not have voted for the candidate the Democrats had chosen..

The behavior of the many other Americans who were overcome with bitterness at the results they felt they had to challenge, has seemed unique in my lifetime, even though I could understand their initial frustrations at having lost the promises that they had voted for.

It is now a year later. I still don't feel I wasted my vote. I do feel that the Republicans who won, including President Trump, have wasted my vote, and the Democrats are also complicit.

Concerns over President Trump and the Republican Congress are not usually expressed that way, but the lack of leadership and the disarray in Congress are not what was expected by those who gave them their margin of victory.

Even those on the losing side in 2016 must have hoped that the victors would end the deadlock, tackle the enormous challenges America faces, and put the election behind them in the interest of unity and progress.

After all, hadn't the losing side campaigned on their theme of "Stronger Together" and hadn't the winners pledged to "Make America Great Again"?

Now, a year later, we are weaker because we are not working together, and Americans are showing no signs of making America great again.

Were some of us "winners at any cost" and some of us still just "sore losers"?

If so, didn't the winners know the falsity of "the ends justify the means"? Didn't the losers really believe in their own concept that these United States of America were strong in the past because we actually did the important things together?

The deadlock Americans had disapproved of has settled in like a cement cloud. Time has been wasted by the lack of leadership and the lack of any real efforts at restoring the needed bipartisanship.

Now well-intentioned representatives and senators are choosing to withdraw rather than feel personally threatened, and humiliated as the result of the growing disarray and seeming inability to bring some harmony into the legislative process.

At that level of our government, reputations are not "saved." Reputations are made.

Sarcasm, denial, revenge, strident criticism, and personal attacks are not the tools needed to get the job done. Without getting the job done, reputations are lost, not made, and reputations cannot even be saved.

Pilots in a tailspin have been taught how to try to survive and save themselves and their aircraft.

There are examples of true statesmanship that can be followed now, examples which can save this current Ship of State, but not unless they are applied before this ship runs out of ocean.

We are all in this together. Last year's losers and winners will suffer alike unless all those who should be in control steer a new and different course. There is little time left to simply waste more of it.

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© 2017 Demas W. Jasper All rights reserved.

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