TRUMP

CONCLUSION 281
Every single person who opposed Donald Trump and didn’t
want him to be President of the United States should have many,
many regrets. I have plenty of them myself. I regret that I didn’t do
more for Sanders, and then that I didn’t do more for Clinton after
Sanders lost. I should have been knocking doors. Instead I watched
movies and wrote magazine articles and went to class. I wrote an academic
article. 762 An academic article! What on earth was I thinking?
I regret that I allowed myself to be lulled into believing everything
would be alright, even though I knew deep down that there was no
rational reason for feeling assuaged, and that the “experts” who were
telling me Clinton would win didn’t know any more than I did.
The truth is, those of us on the left were complacent asses. All of us.
I wrote in February that Trump would definitely defeat Clinton, 763
and I believed that. But then I didn’t act as if I believed it. If I’d really
felt like I believed it, I should have been spending my every waking
hour working to prevent this hideous outcome. I didn’t, though. And
when all of us think of how uselessly we frittered away so much of our
time, how much more we could have done, we may be kicking ourselves
for years. Especially if the nuclear apocalypse shows up.
But now we must fix it. There is no time to sit around in bafflement,
goggle-eyed and slack-jawed. People who were not previously particularly
political need to understand that if they do not get involved, not
just in talking about politics but in taking serious political action, the
consequences could well be dire. Each of us has just been handed an
extraordinary amount of personal moral responsibility.
We may have thought history had ended, that nothing too terribly
unexpected would ever shake us up again. But history never ends.
The future could hold anything. It may hold catastrophe. But there
is no time to think about that. What is needed now is a plan. In the
immortal words of Joe Hill:
Don’t mourn, organize!