A friend send me this thoughtful commentary about our country. It’s both discouraging and uplifting in that it at least tries to analyze what’s going on in an historical sense. I converse with my 85 year old sister regularly in Pennsylvania who proudly voted for Trump. She didn’t like him, but likes the people around him. She’s not quite sure what Trump will really do. She’s a social conservative who can speak without anger so we can chat comfortably. I need to listen but so does she. What she does not realize that her “old order” is dying in a slow and painful way. Some readers may not agree with this. I welcome your comments on this blog.
From William Malcolmson: “I have been thinking a lot about what I want to say after the election. So much has been said. There are post-mortems all over the place. So what can I say? Here goes.
“It seems to me that we are in a transition period in which the old order, the America we knew, is dying, and the new order, the America to come, is being born. The old order was dominated by white men, mostly Protestant, by hierarchies, by European immigrants (generations removed). A mainly mono-cultural society. A place that felt reasonably safe for the majority, but unsafe for the minority. A culture determined by the myth that if you worked hard, didn’t break the law, and abided by the rules, you would succeed financially and spiritually (God would reward you). This was the “American Dream.” Actually, very little of this was actually true, even for white Protestant males and females, but the past is often romanticized, and this was the romantic myth. This was the America in Trump’s “Make America great again.”
“The old order dies hard, and it dies slowly. And painfully. If you are in the dominant group in the culture, and your dominance is coming to an end, it hurts. If the American Dream is not working for you and you think that it should work, you feel “screwed.” If your pain is expressed and no one in power is listening to you, you lash out.
“The emerging new order seems so strange to so many. Women and men are equal. White people will be in the minority. America is becoming a multi-religious nation. You can marry a person of your same sex. Folks who do not look like you are moving into your neighborhood. Mainline churches are losing members. Jobs are there only if you have a college education, understand technology, and can adjust to change, change, change. We are less and less American and more and more global persons, interdependent with other cultures, other ways of looking at life. It is so new, it is so scary, it is so anxious.
