Remaindered Thoughts and Resolutions

It’s over. We who fancy bagels, baguettes and almond milk and read the N.Y. or L.A. Times lost to those who buy white bread and six-packs and get their news from The National Enquirer.

This election may have done America a favor. It has taken us to the sausage factory to see how it is done, given the heartland someone to hate and revealed how rapacious Capitalism functions based on greed and deceit, unregulated, untaxed and unaccountable. It has multinationals salivating. Now let us see if working men and woman can live on their drool and crumbs falling off the boardroom table.   

Seems like the time to wrap it up and look around the corner. Courage is a word I keep running into. To that I shall add, inconvenience. We need to do what is disruptive and what can be more so than calling the moving truck and relocating to those gerrymandered districts to color the map blue. Hillary won California by 4.3 million votes. If 10% of that plurality moved to Red America we would re-claim the House, the Supremes and the Oval office. Even 5% would have been more than enough. Feel the rust. Income distribution would follow population redistribution. If you can’t handle the cold move to Arizona. If that’s too hot we need you in Wisconsin. Central Pennsylvania is bucolic. Michigan is close to Canada. North Carolina has the most flagrant redistricting of all but with a rich cultural heritage. It’s time to toss the salad and stir the soup.

In the meantime our inspirational leader is unable to find any entertainers for inauguration day. He may have to settle for the marching band of Alabama’s football team. Surely there must be some down and out guy in his constituency who can play the harmonica or the washboard. Or maybe he can hire a stripper to do the hoochie-coochie.  

As for resolutions I wish I smoked so I could stop. My weight is what it was sixty years ago but I have less height to carry it. I vow to exercise more in 2017. I’m going to start by getting up from the couch with no hands. I can still put on my pants while standing as long as there is something to lean on. Yes, I shall drink more water though my doctor says water is over-rated.  And yes I’ll make an attempt to organize my papers, clean the refrigerator and find a good home for another slew of books. I may even learn how to use my smart phone with all its apps and clouds….but I doubt it. I wish I remembered my taste for an occasional wee drap. I do love martinis but not so sure how my esophagus feels about that.

Love is always the answer……regardless of the question. We, as a nation, need to cuddle more. To cherish each other and say so. Ah, the consanguinity of kindred spirits! To put flowers on the table. To care-give. I need to write more to my grandkids so they know how weird I can be and they can learn to cultivate their own eccentricities. Maybe we can even love Trump to death. To fill the country with so much creativity and soul it will devour the unreason and malice, to kill it softly with a song...to be reconciled, not resigned.

I can feel it. Songs are being composed. Books written. Poems. Visual art. Euripides is writing another subversive play. Artists are still free to create though it may become an underground activity conducted in Anne Frank’s room or over a barber shop in So-Ho where Salman Rushdie hid. But it will happen. We’ll have our day again.