Jim Walsh
Election Day was a long one for me, as it started at 7 a.m., holding a sign for Harris/Walz at the Nahant Town Hall, and ended at 8 p.m., at the same place, as I sat next to a fellow from the other side to hear the results read out loud by an election worker.
When I first moved to our small town 50 years ago, after the polls closed on Election Day, ballots would be counted by hand, in public, on the stage of Town Hall. If one were so inclined, you could watch from the floor as the process proceeded and get subtle winks and nods from the counters, indicating which way things were going. Finally, often as the clock approached midnight, the Town Clerk would step to the rostrum and announce the results. It was a Norman Rockwell experience that I will treasure always. Now we place our paper ballots in a fast and easy machine counter. At the end of voting now, the results are known in minutes, not hours. The fellow from the other side sitting next to me had been the main advocate for getting the fast, efficient voting machine in place we use today. He was also the fellow who defeated my bid for re-election as Selectman a little more than 25 years ago.
My wife and I were invited to a small Watch Party that evening.
With tallies in hand, I drove over to the gathering on Willow Road, read the Nahant results to the dozen or so neighbors gathered there and chatted for a while with the TV droning in the background. Around 9 p.m., my wife and I bid a good night to our friends and headed home. For me, that was the end of TV for the evening. I always go to bed early on Election Night.
I woke up on Wednesday to find that Donald Trump had won. From my point of view, that meant that ceaseless — and I mean ceaseless — lies and propaganda had turned the tide in his direction.
The results were and are portentous.
When I was given a chance for a college education my goal was to be a high school history teacher. That was after my work as a construction laborer and factory worker. I was 18. I enjoyed physical labor and learning about the world from older workers. But I had also become a “reader” in my teenage years. My best friend from sixth grade, who later attended a private high school and an Ivy League college, drew me in that direction. Personally, I was not a big fan of the high school experience but I had always enjoyed the history courses and the history teachers. Outside of school, in addition to being a difficult son for my parents, I was fascinated with history and, eventually, literature, from Franz Kafka to Jack Kerouac, with the writer of On the Road more resonant than the one who imagined the Metamorphosis of man into a spider. I could actually imagine being on the road with friends from the East Coast to the West while imagining becoming a spider was not so easy.
Now, it seems, I find myself in the middle of history rather than reading about it. As I make my way through my final years, it does not make me happy. Has a metamorphosis of our country begun? Should I get on the road to somewhere else?
I am deeply apprehensive. To my mind, Donald Trump reflects an attitude and point of view expressed in 1753 by Frederick the Great of Prussia. “We shall squeeze the orange and then, when we have swallowed the juice, we shall throw it away.” It is what Trump did in his private life and, especially now, it may be his attitude toward electoral democracy.
The Founders of our electoral democracy are sometimes discarded or disregarded as a bunch of old, dead white men, some of them slaveholders, most of them misogynist, big-time landowners, none tradesmen or workers, who devised a form of government that benefited themselves.
In the present day, who cares what they thought or wrote?
I do.
While our form of government has faltered in the past, with 1860 being the worst, we have survived the ups and downs of political and economic history for more than 225 years. We can only hope our luck has not run out. The White House will not be occupied by a Lincoln or an FDR but, so far, our Constitution survives.
It is The Founders’ thinking that may save us from the worst in America as the rest of the world must suffer the consequences of this election.
I shall follow the advice of Voltaire in the coming days and tend to my garden as I stay close to family and friends, fervently hoping that the checks and balances created by those old white guys in 1787 protect us from disaster.
Jim Walsh lives in Nahant.
