America, We Fucked Up.

A year ago, if you told me that Donald J. Trump would be the 45th president of the United States of America, I would have laughed in your face. Shit, if you told me the morning of Election Day that he’d win the electoral vote over Hillary Clinton, I wouldn’t have believed you. “No way,” I’d have said, “that man’s a joke.”

Well, that joke of a man just won the election.

I know. It’s crazy. It’s absurd. It’s unbe-fucking-lievable. Over the course of our 227-year presidential election history, we’ve endured our share of incompetent, under-qualified, possibly corrupt chief executives. But we’ve never had one who was more plainly stupid, downright ignorant, or clearly inept for the job.

I could go on and on about Donald Trump: He’s a pathological liar and a hilarious failure of a businessman, he has virtually no knowledge of politics and actually thinks global warming is a hoax, he’s an enabler for racism, sexism, misogyny, white male supremacy, narcissism, intolerance, etc. But I won’t because you’ve heard it all before and, more importantly, the real problem here isn’t Donald Trump. No, the real problem is the fact that someone like him could even come close to becoming president of the United States, much less actually be inaugurated. In a deeper sense, this isn’t about Trump or Clinton or any of the other candidates. It’s about us.

As a democracy, we the citizens have the right to vote on the representatives that we want to have in charge of major political, social, and economic decisions. It’s a beautiful system in theory: it promotes a sense of involvement, prevents the monopoly of authority, imposes equality, makes for a responsible and stable administration, and so on and so forth. But in order for this system to work in reality, it requires a population of educated, thoughtful citizens. The power is in our hands, and if we’re going to govern ourselves, we must be knowledgable about issues and have the ability to weigh claims and sort fact from fiction.

Clearly we, as a nation, are undeserving of that power. Nothing screams “failure” of the system more loudly than the sight of thousands of Trump supporters cheering wildly as he tells one blatant lie after another. The unfortunate truth is that Donald Trump and his team ran a brilliant campaign. He created a brand that nearly sixty million people supported because they believed it’s in their self-interest, leveraged the power of the media and generated a huge amount of attention, and provided one clear and simple perceived benefit (“Make American Great Again!”). Build a wall, defeat ISIS, out with the “politicians” and in with the rich guy who funds his own campaign and can’t be bought… Does it all hold together as policy? Any slightly-intelligent sentient being could realize that it doesn’t. But it also doesn’t matter, because Trump wasn’t trying to appeal to the informed, knowledgable crowd. He understood the size and scope of his target audience and marketed himself perfectly to them. Don’t blame the player, blame the game.

So what happens now? I’ll be completely honest: I have no fucking clue. Trump announced that he’d be running for president in June 2015 and still to this day I don’t know what his plans and policies are or what they will be. Truth be told, I don’t even think he knows. He’s said that he’d do a lot of things, but most of his statements fall under at least one of the following categories:

1) that’s idiotic

2) that’s just not going to happen

3) that conclusion is defensible, but he clearly doesn’t understand the reasoning behind it and that makes me nervous

Take his main economic promise, for example: “I’m going to revitalize lost manufacturing jobs.” News flash, everyone: Manufacturing jobs in the US haven’t been “lost” because of political reasons or because “immigrants are taking them away”; they’re gone because of globalization and the progress of technology. Intelligent automation and machines have and will continue to make more and more of the workforce obsolete. Those jobs aren’t coming back, and anyone who believes that Trump can turn back the clock on globalization and technological development and “revitalize” them is a horribly deluded fool.

But on the bright side, I do trust our system of checks and balances. No one person has the power to destroy America, no matter what they do. America is bigger than you or me, and America is much, much bigger than Donald Trump. We have to look at the larger picture here. Don’t get me wrong, I hate that he is my country’s president. But eventually his term(s) will end and we, as a nation, will still have to face the more important and long-term concern: how to ensure that we are capable of making decisions, such as selecting a president, wisely. As democracy’s ultimate deciders, we must educate ourselves. We must become critical thinkers, begin to question things, and be skeptical. We must become open-minded, empathetic, and tolerant. Because if we don’t, our fundamental problem will still remain. And that, not a few years of Donald Trump in the Oval Office, is the greatest danger to our democracy.

- Jerry

This piece was originally published here.

Image from http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2015-runner-up-donald-trump/