I Was Wrong...

...It happens. It’s happened before. It wasn’t just me. But those of us who were wrong were way off.

I honestly can’t remember ever being this wrong about anything. For starters, I was wrong about the polls’ ability to paint an objective picture. I was wrong to pay attention to ‘favorability ratings’.

I was wrong about the media’s inability to see beyond it’s own biases, wrong about it’s reach, it’s ability to influence. I think a lot of us were.

But mostly, and most painfully, is how wrong I was about my fellow Americans.

I was wrong about how angry they must be, about what they think is happening to our country. I was wrong about what they define as ‘great’, and about how many of them felt this way. I was wrong about the type of conduct they would condone from a potential leader of our country, about how much experience or strategy is thought to be sufficient for such a job. I was wrong about our tolerance for cruel and racist language being transmitted directly into our homes, wrong about the type of role model we want for our children. I was wrong to assume that everyone could see what I see and that it would frighten them. I was wrong about what kind of country I thought I lived in, about what being an American means to people, wrong to believe that kindness and decency toward everyone was still a real underpinning of that. I was wrong to believe that democracy was immune to reductive thinking. I was wrong about whom we might consider our champion, about whom we would put our trust in, whom we believe will lead us forward, toward something better.

And so, in my wrongness, we’ve elected a man that I thought had no chance of winning, who has none of the character I’d hope for in my leader, none of the restraint or generosity or compassion. We’ve handed the keys to our country to a man that threatens those who oppose or criticize him, calling them liars, telling them they’ll be sued, calling our democracy rigged. And by doing so we are saying, as a nation, that we are okay with these things, that he represents us in the world, that he is the best of us. We are saying that America was broken, and he is the man to fix it.

So now that Donald Trump—a man I have at times viewed as a laughing-stock, a bully, a panderer, a liar, a clueless diva, a narcissist, a totalitarian, a person that will say anything if he thinks it will help him win, someone with a gaping hole in their heart that can never be filled by all the adulation in the world—is my president, I can only hope I’m wrong about him too.