The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
An American road not taken
Robert Frost wrote the poem “The Road Not Taken” in 1915. It is a poem about choosing and its consequences and ends with the lines, “I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence/ Two roads diverged in a wood, and I/I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.”
Will America, and Americans, be asking the same question perhaps only years and months hence about their votes in November 2016? Does it depend on the voter? What will it take to put doubt and dissatisfaction in the mind of the Trump voter? Are we going to find out?
If you are a Democrat who didn’t show up to vote for Hillary Clinton or voted for Jill Stein, your sighing and circumspection may already have begun. If you are Hillary Clinton for that matter, lots of “roads not taken” may now seem more evident: the ones that would have led to the White House.
So let’s look at the “two roads” our vote last November would have taken us down. We know some of what the Trump presidency will look like: chaos and conflict and an intent, if there is any, only to reverse as much of the Obama legacy as it can. Is this leadership?
Character is destiny and we also have a president more interested in picking fights than serving the American people, in Twitter wars more than briefing books, in bile more than bridge building. He has not, it is safe to say, added dignity or sobriety to the office he holds or any sense of the larger mission he might represent.
Will President Trump be able to deliver on his campaign promises? A border wall, repealing Obamacare, bringing jobs back to America — all unlikely to happen. Will this change the core support of his base? Probably not. But what about the rest of us? What are we getting instead of failed campaign rhetoric?
Perhaps the hardest look down “the road not taken” is at what we — Americans — might have been had we, as a people, elected Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump. She is not without baggage and may be too close to interests we are not fully happy with, but no one can doubt she would not have worked harder and smarter and with more genuine intent to serve the American people and the world beyond them.
Would not her election have announced a new era of possibility, equality and forward motion? Would she have said to the world America was leading again, representing the best values of inclusion and opportunity and tolerance, of multiplicity, not division? Would she not have brought — or maintained — the dignity of the office of the president? Yes and emphatically yes.
As Robert Frost wrote, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way/I doubted if I should ever come back.” We will never know what progress our society would have made, or continued, what our national narrative might have become had we elected Hillary Clinton: not the woman but the positive agenda she represented.
Instead, we will get an incompetent bourgeois hack pretending to be president and an America adrift, led not to greatness but to division, discord and ever more corrosive politics. Mr. Trump’s supporters will not get what they were promised and the rest of us are just along for the ride.
The scary part? Donald Trump is also too myopic, clueless and disinterested to pay attention to what really matters, much less lead. The world, our economy and the character of our nation will go north, south or west, depending on what winds are blowing.
Thankfully, in four years, it will be over. Lots of ground will have been missed, wreckage left and better roads not taken, but America has endured almost as much and persevered, even found its native genius again.
Let’s hope.