Frustrations remain in wake of election

ROLLING FORK—We have made a choice but we have by no means accepted it.
An election is over, but in the minds of half the country nothing is resolved.
We have gone through our every four year exercise in citizenship, but the citizenry is even more restless than when we began it.
Sitting down here in the hinterlands, this old observer of both American politics and the human condition for more than the last year now has increasingly felt that what he was witnessing was not the regular, orderly democratic transition of power in the United States, but rather the often bizarre, no-set-rules, anything goes machinations of what passes for such in the banana republics to our south.
And now, that it is, at least in one (and maybe just one) sense “over,” this old observer senses that even more so.
Because while I can but guess at its shape, speculate about its makeup, this old man’s political senses remain sufficiently hewn, yet keen enough to see, hear and perhaps most importantly feel that something evil this way comes.
It is fueled by the same frustrations and powered by the same anger that just produced the ugliest, most debasing and nigh onto obscene presidential election in modern American politics and neither electoral college totals nor vote tallies are going to do anything except intensify both.
The frustration will only grow.
The anger will only intensify.
I really don’t think we quite know what we have done, but I know it will have consequences galore.
It is one thing when somebody like me says it, as I have with some consistency for a while now, but is quite another when somebody of the stature of Tom Brokaw says the self-same thing: the American people are more divided now than they have been in my lifetime.
We are balkanized. We are tribal. We are strangers in our common land.
It would be easy to point a finger at race as we so often do, as the spring from which our problems flow, but the truth is much more complicated even than that always complicated subject. It was conventional wisdom that no political candidate or party can win a national election without courting, much less failing to alienate the rapidly growing Latino population. However, only because that is so obvious is it really different from the perception that American politics has always been made up of its various ethnic components.
Oh, well.
In a real sense, 2016 America is better differentiated today, as in a sense it always has been, by the haves and have-nots, and the haves and the have-nots are then further identified by the college educated and the non-college educated.
That’s not some socio-economic topic for academic discussion, that is directly observable in election returns—that picture most obviously painted by who voted for whom.
Today we have a president-elect, one who will be sworn as the nation’s 45th, come January. That’s what happens every four years and we the people, maybe disappointed, maybe not happy, maybe even fearful or anxious, always seem to somehow, to varying degrees, manage to come together as we always have and get on about the business of our lives. That is, after all, just what we do in America—the peaceful transition of power.
But something feels different this time, doesn’t it? Something seems uneasy, this time, doesn’t it? We’ve just spent an election season hammering chisel blows into our very institutions of government and it is as if we now await the first cracks to appear.
And this I know: All of that frustration and all of that anger has to now be channeled somewhere, must now manifest in some way.
But where? And what?
Ray Mosby is editor and publisher of the Deer Creek Pilot.