Volunteered Slavery, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

December 2, 2016 Victor El-Khouri 1 Comment

For some reason, I can’t wake up from the nightmare that is the upcoming Trump regime.  He hasn’t even been sworn in yet, and already his supporters feel entitled to harass the rest of us.

This kind of violence, whether physical or verbal, is horrible.  It’s even worse because these entitled abusers act like they won the election.

They did, according to the Electoral College.  But that kind of win is part of a rigged system.

There are all sorts of reasons that the Founding Fathers established the Electoral College.  In those pre-technology times, it made a certain amount of sense to entrust individuals to represent the votes of their various states or colonies.  Those reasons don’t apply today.

As many different historical sources demonstrate (here and here, just for a couple examples), the real reason for the Electoral College is to placate the slave-states and thus preserve the United States.  Representation was apportioned based on population (including counting each slave as 3/5s of a person) instead of being based on citizenship.  From the get-go, under-populated rural areas have had a disproportionate say in who occupies the White House.  They got credit for owning people who could not vote.

No taxation without representation, my ass.

This inequality continues today.  A state like South Dakota, for example, has a population of just under 850,000 people.  New York City has a population nearly ten times that.  South Dakota gets two senators.  New York City has to share senators with the rest of the state.  Similarly, South Dakota gets one representative in Congress for it’s 850,000 people.  New York shares a total of 27 Representatives with the rest of the state (total population 19.75 million).

My vote counts less than the vote of someone in South Dakota.

In some ways, this makes me want to persuade a few thousand of my friends to move, except that I don’t really want to live there.  I’m sure it’s quite beautiful, but I don’t believe they have real pizza.  I don’t want to get stuck in traffic because of buffalo.  Also, when it’s cold out, I prefer to have a nice movie theater within walking distance.

In any case, Trump might have won the Electoral College, but he didn’t win the popular vote.  As I write this, it is estimated that Hillary out-polled him by more than 2 million votes.  We must constantly remind him (and the Republican Congress) that the American people were with her.

The short-fingered vulgarian doesn’t act like he lost the popular vote.  He also doesn’t act as if he made any promises to the people who voted for him.  Remember how he was going to stand up to the banks and to Wall Street?  That’s not what’s happening.  Trump’s prospective cabinet is made up entirely of the elitist plutocrats and entrenched politicians he railed against on the campaign trail.

What can we do?  I don’t have all the answers, but I have a few.  Some of them will work, some won’t, and some of the best will be thought of by people who are not me.  For example, Kareem Abdul Jabbar wrote a really good op-ed piece urging well-researched and targeted boycotts.  Normally, I don’t look to professional athletes for insightful political commentary, but I’m delighted to be wrong in my stereotyped assumptions in this case.

Actually, I’m almost always delighted to have my stereotyped assumptions smashed.  It makes life so much more interesting.

We also need to peacefully demonstrate, to write letters to our representatives at the state, local and national level.  We need to run for office ourselves.  We need to have conversations with those we wish to persuade (and at the same time, be open to persuasion ourselves), and we need to yell loudly when someone says something hateful.

Most of all, we need to stand with each other and love each other and support each other.  It’s what makes us different from Drumpf <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnpO_RTSNmQ> and his supporters.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases is relieved her grandmother didn’t live to see Trump “elected,” because her apartment building would have been surrounded by Secret Service agents.