A lot of people were really really hoping to see the end of the interminable U.S. election, after week upon week, month upon month, of the rhetoric and bombast and insults that just permeated this presidential campaign.
Unfortunately, even with the election over and people are finding it rather difficult to deal with the shock of a president named Donald J. Trump to soon occupy the White House, it just doesn’t seem to be ending, does it?
The protests in many U.S. cities against Trump are just going on and on, prompting some thoughts to sort of percolate up through my brain.
One thought is to observe the irony of these protests in a country that usually takes inordinate pride in their promotion of democracy. If you consider what they’re protesting, it’s really rather undemocratic, isn’t it?
I don’t mean the expression of opinion about Trump — he’s fair game, obviously, since he’s now the president, and people are free to stand in the street and call him out for things he does or says. What I am referring to are these protests saying “Not my president” and so on. Well guess what, people? In a country that espouses democracy and the vote and so on, the people voted in high numbers, and they went with Trump. You kind of have to live with it now, that’s how the people have spoken, like it or not.
This calls to mind a song by the Eagles, a song I love for the attitude they express, and it badly needs to be played loudly at these protests: “Get over it!”
The song decries the proliferation of people and special interest groups crying out for their rights and whining when things don’t go their way, like they’re entitled to whatever they want, and the singer basically tells them to grow up and “get over it”.
In this case, whining about how a vote went is pretty useless and stupid; the vote was held, it’s incontrovertible, and is now the reality, so get on with your lives and, seriously, “get over it.”
The real question now is, what will things look like going forward, and how will issues be dealt with by the new president? Will Trump reallyl rip up the NAFTA agreement, which he called the worst agreement ever made in the history of the United States? This issue will have a direct impact on the Canadian economy, including our grain and cattle producers, and possibly also our oil industry and manufacturers.
Will he still “build the wall” and send the bill to the Mexican government? He seemed to waffle a bit on that in his “60 Minutes” interview.
Thinking about how Canada might respond to some of these issues would be far more useful for newscasts to cover than continuing to show people protesting something that won’t change.
