Election day reflections, a few weeks later

When my mom and dad were born, a woman couldn't vote in the US.  A black man theoretically could vote, but his right to do so was usually denied, usually, alas, by Democrats in the south.  A woman and man of different races could not marry in most of the US.  Folks from poor backgrounds like my folks didn't really have much chance of going to college to change their lot in life.  If someone without money got seriously ill, they usually died, like my grand-uncle's young wife and their two-year old child in the flu epidemic of 1918.

A little over 40 years later when I was born, a woman could vote in the US.  Barriers to black folk voting would be torn down a few years later with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, laws pushed through by more visionary Democrats.  A few years later Medicare and Medicaid programs were enacted by Democrats so people without means had access to health care.    My father, who grew up on a tenant farm in Missouri, went to college after World War II with the GI Bill.  My brother would go to college a few years after I was born, my mother would get her degree 14 years after I was born, and from an early age I just assumed I'd go to college.  As a kid, my grandmother used to say with pride, "I'm a Baptist and a Democrat," and my parents took me to vote and see them vote for Democrats because the Democratic party tried to help all people, not just the rich.

A little over 40 years after I was born, I sat with my parents and cheered and cried as we watched as Barack Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man, was nominated to be the Democratic candidate for president.  Unfortunately there were and still are folk who try to keep people of color from voting, but such efforts have the boom-a-rang effect of making people more determined to vote.  More and more people in the United States are getting the chance to go to college.  The Affordable Care Act enacted by Democrats provides access to health care to millions who did not have access before.  People of all races can marry anyone who they wish.  The country continues to try to be better with every generation, to try to be a more perfect union.

Today, 4  years  to the day after burying my parents, I voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton to be the first woman to become President of the United States.  I'm sad my mom never got to vote for a woman to be President in the general election, but perhaps for a moment, she can feel like she did.

I wrote the words above a week ago, when I thought I was voting for the next president. Alas I was not voting for our next president.  A grim week has followed, no doubt to be followed by 4 years of trying times for Democrats like myself and my parents.  But they lived through war, many years of Repbulican presidents and governments, and they turned out ok.  They taught me to hate Nixon from an early age, long before Watergate.   They fumed at the corruption and scandals of the Reagan administration.   Their hatred of Bush came from his administrations callousness to the death and maiming of young men in war, something my dad lived through in WWII and my mom remembered from working at Walter Reed during the Vietnam War, when she would see countless amputees being walked and wheeled around the base. They no doubt would wince at the things Trump and the Republicans will say and do in coming months and years.  But they would hope for something better in the future, and I will try to do the same.