I'm Sorry, but I Can't Stop Being an Optimist

I know what happened in 2106. It was a "perfect storm" of converging anomalies. Hillary was battered for 30 years from lies about her. That set a foundation for the ill informed to not like her, but nobody really knew why. She was favored and Trump was so obnoxious that too many of us were too overconfident. We could not believe our fellow Americans could elect such a jerk. You see, even the Trump supporters thought they would lose. Michael Flynn wrote an op-ed supporting the Turkish dictator the day before the general election. When he was told that this could be a problem for him, he replied, "only if we win". Jim Comey committed a cardinal sin by releasing information about some bogus investigation against Hillary that broke her political momentum and put the campaign on the defensive in the last 6 days. Trump, for once, listened to his advisers and stayed on point and off twitter for the last 2 weeks. And the Russians. They caught us all by surprise by weaponizing lies on social media to reinforce the lies on face book, twitter and Fox News. And, in the end, Hilary won the popular vote and the Electoral College fell in such a way that it almost seems spooky.

I say all this so when I tell you what I think will happen on Tuesday, that the inevitable response about the 2016 election has already been answered. It was a once in a 200 year event. We will return to the norm. And the norm is that Americans are good in nature, intelligent by design, caring in heart and, inevitably, will do the right thing. Not all of them, mind you. 30% to 35% will never come out from the dark side, but those assholes have always been with us. They supported slavery and Jim Crow laws. There was Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin. We had George Wallace and other racists soil our public discourse. But, other than this Trump aberration, no one took the levers of power and regressed the march to freedom. I know we have had racists. Andrew Johnson and Woodrow Wilson come to mind. But progress toward freedom marched on because of the inherent goodness of so many Americans. Certainly this is not the first time immigrants have been demonized. I am the grandson of Italian Immigrants who came to this country before there were immigration laws (1919). I heard the stories. But still, the American system created a great life for all of the generations of my family, because Americans are basically good. Not all of us, but a large majority. We make mistakes. What we did to Native Americans, immigrants, slaves, minorities, the Japanese in World War II and our involvement in foreign conflicts where we were on the wrong side, like Viet Nam, we do our best to admit our mistake and work to correct it. We, as a people, are far from perfect, but a vast majority of Americans are good.

This is the optimism I see for Tuesday. Americans, in the privacy of that voting booth, will, as a people recognize, admit and begin the correction of the mistake that was made on November 8th, 2016.

I believe the huge, midterm turnout tells us something. The American people are not coming out to vote in these vast numbers to re-affirm what happened in 2016. They are flocking to the polls, as we have done as a people throughout history, to correct that mistake.