Election 2016’s message to establishment elites: Get your act together

I have this grouping of posts that I call my “too honest” posts. These posts are my least viewed, and oddly enough, are among my personal favorites, which shows how bad my judgment is when it comes to my work! Like the post where I beg legislators, in iambic pentameter, to address the drug epidemic in a comprehensive way.

Or the post where I try to explain how I became such a broken creature on behalf of all the other broken creatures out there.

Or my last post I wrote in response to the presidential election.

In that post I talked about how I had to tune out the news for a while in the wake of the election.

Well, I tried to tune back in this weekend. I should have waited longer because I cannot believe the main storyline is still about how shocked our political, media and entertainment elites are by President-elect Trump’s victory.

Since the news storylines haven’t changed since my last post election analysis that went down in a ball of unread flames, I’ve decided to go all in and include thoughts I edited from it. It’s my message to anyone in the establishment still expressing shock about Trump’s victory:  Get a grip people, and that’s coming from someone who did NOT support Trump’s candidacy.

However, I do understand why people did.

I resent the condescension toward non-Clinton supporters that led up to this election, and I resent it even more in its wake. What didn’t the establishment get?

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Newsflash for establishment elites:  People didn’t want to hear about the Clintons’ high end speech gigs on Wall Street and foundation perks. People who trying to come up with enough money (in an economy that’s left them behind) to bury their children who were stricken by a drug epidemic that Washington DC has largely ignored aren’t going to take kindly to that foolishness.

Aren’t these so-called elites looking down on Trump supporters/non-Clinton supporters college-educated? Aren’t they familiar with the whole Marie Antoinette thing?

If establishment elites don’t start understanding soon, voters will probably end up with even worse choices under worsening circumstances four years from now.

Why didn’t establishment elites see this coming? Because they were too busy riding their high horses of hypocrisy to see all the trampled people below them.

While Clinton supporters were busy attacking Trump for talking like a despot and a demagogue — which he was — Wikileaks and other sources revealed that the Clinton team had been working with the media/DNC/Obama administration, discrediting honorable public servants like Senator Bernie Sanders, wheeling and dealing with the ultra rich, and inciting violence, among other things.

The Clinton team’s conduct reads like a row of Jeopardy questions under the heading:  things people do to install a despot.

And then there’s the beef with putting an alleged sexual predator in the Oval Office, perhaps the most pathetic of the Clinton team’s hypocrisies. So if Trump is an alleged sexual predator, what does that make Clinton? The queen of alleged sexual predators?

Last I paid attention, she was surrounded by alleged sexual predators including her husband, Anthony Weiner, and even Trump himself until the friendship ended when he entered politics. And let’s not forget President Clinton’s friendship with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

What is the 2016 message to establishment elites, especially Democrats? That they’ve been too busy fundraising or courting this voting block or that special interest group or lining their own pockets — so busy that they’ve forgotten to take care of Americans as a whole, as a healthy people with a healthy economy in a safe nation with sound foreign policy.

So, if you’re still wrapped up in your shock, please get over it. Please get your act together and when I use the word “act,” I’m really thinking of a swear word that starts with the letter s. Please take all the energy you are wasting expressing your shock and put it toward whatever cause you worry will be harmed by a Trump administration … the potential list is long.

I, for one, am tired of all the handwringing going on. Myself, I’m not feeling shock at all. Instead, I am feeling like the outcome would have sucked either way …

I am feeling like our establishment elites need to get their act together before their inanity leads to even worse choices in 2018 and 2020 …

I am feeling confused as to how the folks in the driver’s seat landed our nation in this ditch at this exact angle …

I am feeling like there’s lots of things to feel besides shock so it’s time for folks to start moving beyond that one reaction and start processing the giant case of denial hidden behind it.

Patricia Callahan

About Patricia Callahan

Trish is a writer who lives in Augusta. She has worked professionally in education and social services.