What has 2016 taught me about America?
Editor: After a week of conversation and observation, amazing how perspectives and opinions have changed based on this election’s outcome. As protesters filled the streets, distraught over the recent election, their complaints rang of a not so distant past.
As ideas like CalExit are discussed over social media, closet conservatives mock such notions as millennial melodrama, and maybe they’re right, but was that true when secessionist petitions garnered the support of nearly a million people right after the 2012 election? While it seems so convenient for Trump supporters to call for figures rioting against the outcome of this year’s election to leave the country, it wasn’t that long ago that supporters of the reelection of President Obama were petitioning the government to strip the citizenship of those individuals petitioning for state secession.
The Republican outcry over the indecency of individuals claiming that Trump will not be recognized as their president is comical. It was only eight years ago that Mitt Romney said he couldn’t support President Obama just eight days into his first term because of “failed policies.” Rush Limbaugh famously went on the record as saying “I hope he fails.”
It sounds like we are deciding when we want to be offended. Do we really know that much more about our president elect to warrant so much support on merits? No, we don’t, but that’s not the point.
If you were critical of protests in 2012, continue to be so. If disrespect for our president elect bothers you now, I hope it bothered you just as much over the past two elections. Let’s be consistent. Let’s not hold others to a higher standard than we are willing to hold ourselves. We like the Golden Rule when we win and like to ignore it when we lose.
The great news is that we do not have to go down this road. We do not have to repeat history just to see it rhyme in the next election. But we have to make a commitment to decency and respect now, and not forget in four years. JONATHAN SOLIS Lodi