Three to four days before the 2024 Elections, I was thinking about what I would write in response to the results.  I was pondering in my head what I would say if Kamala Harris won, and if Donald Trump were victorious.  I was really hoping to write about my thoughts on Vice President Harris becoming the first female president, and the continuing efforts to hold Donald Trump accountable for his many transgressions, but unfortunately, that is not how the cookie crumbled.  So here is my response now:

I am happy that Harris conceded.  Her manner of accepting her loss but continuing to speak out strongly against Trump is exactly how I would have wanted her to concede.  I am happy not because of the lofty principle of public officials peacefully accepting results in a democracy.  It is because if Harris did not concede, it would be the equivalent of trying to desperately revive a person who is clearly dead.  It is an act of being honest with her supporters and giving us permission to grieve.  One of the small silver linings of a second Trump administration is that those who oppose him will know what to expect and can start planning now the best possible manners of resistance.  Grieving and resistance planning are much more productive uses of time than trying to challenge an election result that cannot be changed.

I am sure that there is plenty of finger-pointing and complaints about what the Harris campaign did wrong.  I do not have the slightest bit of interest in reading about it, and it mostly does not matter.   I will just say that the Democrats are in a stronger position now than they were when Trump started his first term in 2017.  There are 23 Democratic Governors now as opposed to 16 in 2017.  There are going to be approximately 210-214 Democratic Representatives now, maybe even more, as opposed to 194 in 2017, and Democrats will control about 39-40 state legislative chambers now in contrast to the 31 that they controlled in 2017.  Those are all people that will fight tooth and nail anything unreasonable that Trump will propose (which will probably be most things).  Some of these Democrats will be prominent and powerful opposition leaders to Trump in their own right.  None of this is downplaying those challenges that lie ahead but it is just me stating some numbers to note.

Now while these Democrats will mourn, point fingers at each other, and hopefully figure out the best path to opposing Trump, I will be doing something different.  Ever since President Obama’s first election, I have been voraciously reading and watching has been going on in national politics.  I have experienced the joys and anxieties that have occurred along the way.  But over the past several months, I have started to curtail the amount of time that I spend reading the national news.  Now that effort will go further.  After 4 years, 8 years, maybe even 16 years, I am tired of being a slave to the news.  I am off to a decent start, having avoided reading anything on the news site Politico for almost 24 hours, a website that I have read religiously for years.  I don’t know how successful I will be, nor do I know exactly what it will entail with regards to the amount of news, if any that I will follow.  I certainly don’t expect this to be easy.  But hopefully, the news that I read will make me happier, such as sports news, and what I watch on computer will make me laugh instead of clenching my teeth.  It would be nice to go back to reading thrillers such as a Stephen King novel.  Hopefully, this will put me in a better state of mind mentally and will cause me to lead a fulfilling life over the next few years.

I encourage others who are dissatisfied with the election results to curtail their news consumption like I am doing now.  There will probably be nothing on the national level that will give us any feelings of positiveness.  This will mean that the topics that I write about in this blog will probably change.  That is fine with me, for as long as I produce something that is original and shows the best of my writing abilities, that will be good enough.  I am sure it will be good enough for my readers.