The right thing
It is 8:45am Pacific Time on Saturday November 7th. We are four days after the US election.
I am catching up on email and twitter when the news finally hits: “CNN predicts Joseph R Biden Junior as the next president of the United States. Kamala Harris will be the first woman and person of color as vice-president of the United States.”.
My English breakfast tea whispered to me:
“Winston Churchill once famously observed that Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.”
When more than 70 million Americans voted for lies, my tea is clearly wrong. That’s what you get when you commit the ultimate British faux-pas and make tea in the microwave.
When Trump won in 2016, I got the impression he was as surprised as many of us “Shit, I really won. Now I got to go to work.”
However at least Trump inherited lots of goodness. Not the least, president Obama had rebuilt the US economy from disaster. They had done in a very short time an incredible job. A solid foundation was laid, the walls were up, the roof was being put down. The only thing missing were the roof tiles. That’s when our so called president-builder came in to claim the keys to the front door.
It does appear to me that the Democratic presidents and vice-presidents should rebrand themselves as “The cleanup crew” or “The repair pair”.
Don’t underestimate the immense task ahead of our next president: a broken economy, a pandemic spinning out of control and a divided country. Tonight’s celebrations are less “woohoo we won” and more “let’s go to work!” What a contrast.