Monthly Archives: March 2016

My Plan for Election Day: Prayer, Humility, and Patience

Come Election Day in the USA, I will not be doing anything different than I should do on any other day. I plan to pray, to humble myself, and to be patient in my circumstances. But on the day that the USA looks set to elect someone that will be utterly unfit to be president, I suppose that I shall do those things with greater purpose.

Clinton is most likely to have the Democrats’ nomination. Here is a person that went out of her way to create a system to bypass security at the Department of State. Her own needs trumped those of the people of this nation. Her communications, which should have been the property of the people, became her own property, for her to deal with as she saw fit. I cannot have confidence in such a person in the role of the President. Add to this how she built up a foreign policy that resulted in the interventions that destabilized the whole of the Middle East and Ukraine, putting the USA on a collision course with Russia, and we have an extremely dangerous warmonger with poor operational security practices as the likely Democrat nominee.

I honestly don’t know who will emerge as victor from the knife fight that is the Republican nomination process. It could be Cruz, it could be Trump. Cruz is hated in the Senate and I see no good coming of that. He does not compromise, and that is a terrible feature in a president, if he is to avoid impeachment for his sheer odiousness in his role, as happened to Andrew Johnson. As for Trump, the man is a private army and an armband away from being a Nazi. He considers Americans of my faith – Mormons – to be “alien”, and that is the first step towards demonizing us for his political gain. He’s already demonized Muslims, and I won’t stand for that in a President.

Cruz and Clinton both are creatures of the current party system, totally beholden to special interests, particularly in the defense and banking industries. Trump may not be in their back pocket, which I would normally find admirable, but he is such a narcissist that he comes across as his own special interest. This is, utterly, a no-win situation.

So I shall pray, not for God to smite anyone or to change the choice of a nation, for that is not what I desire. I shall pray that I might have strength to endure the trials my nation will surely face in the coming days and years. I shall humble myself, that I will seek to work on my own imperfections, that I might be found acceptable when I return to my Heavenly Father one day. And I shall be patient, for I endure to the end, regardless of the hardship and suffering between now and the end.

The world is still a beautiful place, and there is good I can yet do. Even if the world is to end tomorrow, I have seeds to plant today.

Things Could be Much Worse…

On the one hand, I don’t want to see Trump become president. On the other hand, I have a stronger desire to not see his supporters erupt in an armed putsch if he doesn’t get nominated due to GOP insider machinations. Even less would I want to see a candidate harness the seething rage that would result from an assassination of Trump.

There’s what I want and what I got right now. And what’s going on now is very gritty. There’s quite a lot of rage in Middle America, and whenever in history the middle class is frustrated in its upward progress, it will turn to politics to create the necessary upheaval to change the situation. When politics fails, the middle class resorts to violence. The USA dodged a huge bullet with the election of FDR in 1932. If both Trump and Sanders get short-shrifted by their respective parties, we’ll have some very dark days ahead of us.