I am a sore loser or in good company?

“It is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company.” –  George Washington

Since the election I have had to pare down the amount of time I spend watching or listening to the national news. I haven’t gotten busier, I just can’t take it. Rather than listening to MSNBC in the car as I drive around town I find myself listening to the comedy channel. Rather than watching The Rachel Maddow Show I watch reruns of Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory or my favorite The Andy Griffith Show (black & white, not the color episodes).

I know what I am doing, I am hiding, burying my head in the sand. But sadly I can’t escape. Each day I hear about the new asinine administrative or cabinet picks OUR President-Elect has made. Each day I hear about some new enlightened piece of wisdom our President-Elect has tweeted out and each day I grow more despondent and depressed. Yes, I am watching old black and white episodes of Andy Griffith, episodes I can quote the scripted lines of verbatim, for my mental health. But can I do this for four years? Will I have to do it for four years?

On my side of the family all of the adults, save for one we think, voted for Hillary Clinton. The one that we all assume voted for Donald Trump kept his head down and his mouth shut over Thanksgiving. I can’t compliment him for his “brights” in choosing The Donald but I can for not trying to justify his vote around the dinner table.

As we, save for one, bemoaned the future of our country I wondered if we were all just being sore losers? It is hard, very hard, to see your candidate win the popular vote (now by more than 2.5 million votes), which would seem to be the most important and relevant determinant of an election only to lose the electoral vote which few of us even understand. For me it would have been easier to process if Clinton had lost the popular vote as well. But alas, that didn’t happen.

“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” – Donald Trump tweet on 11-27-16

and more

“It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than the Electoral College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4 states instead of the 15 states that I visited. I would have won even more easily and convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!” – Donald Trump tweet on 11-27-16

and still more

“Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!” – Donald Trump tweet on 11-27-16

So, I am a sore loser? Are the 65 million of us who voted for Clinton against the 62.5 million who voted for Trump sore losers? Here is what I think. Presidents love to talk about receiving a “mandate for change” . In my heart, our President-Elect didn’t get that privilege. What he did receive is a mandate to lead, not by majority of Americans but by the policies of the United States. He can tweet all he wants about voter fraud, or illegal votes. Having “indisputable facts” to back up one of Mr. Trump’s claims has never prevented his fingers from hammering out some bogus point or opinion for his rabid followers to accept as the gospel (it’s a smart phone folks not a tablet of stone from God). What many of us have learned about Mr. Trump is that his knowledge is a mile wide and only an inch deep. Let’s just hope, for our country’s sake, that the depth of his knowledge improves quickly.

I am sure over the course of the next few months I will start listening too and watching the news again. But I have decided that if I am a sore loser I am in good company, actually, very good company and at the end of the day it is always about the company that you keep.

“If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you. The world will be yours and everything in it, what’s more, you’ll be a man, my son.” – Rudyard Kipling