Cali Nation

Marcia and I woke the morning after the election to the sounds of Waste Management trucks picking up the recycling cans, and my first words to Marcia were, “Apparently total collapse of the system has been delayed.”

I find I am not surprised Trump won. He is the fruit, if you will, of forty years of economic policies that destroyed the manufacturing infrastructure of the nation and stole trillions from the lower and middle classes to fatten the rich; and people who were hurt economically and emotionally by that destruction and thievery elected Trump.

When I traveled around America in the 1960s and 70s, it became clear to me that America is a union of regions as different from each other as the countries of Europe are different from each other. Because of the physical enormity of our country, the design of our union encourages states to make their own laws and create their own operating systems, and that is what California needs to do now, more than ever, in the wake of Trump’s election and Congress becoming overwhelmingly Republican.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger was Governor of California, our state legislators twice passed a bill that would have created a statewide Single Payer Healthcare plan to provide all Californians with truly affordable healthcare and save the state tens of billions of dollars every year. Arnold vetoed those bills in service to the pharmaceutical and insurance companies who gave him millions of dollars in exchange for his veto.

Now that Trump and Paul Ryan plan to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, this is a golden opportunity for California’s legislators to again pass a Single Payer Healthcare law. We can also create a state bank to help us weather the inevitable economic downturns ahead. There is much talk about a progressive movement to take back Congress from the Republicans, but I suggest more substantive change can be implemented, and much sooner, on the state level.

Much is also being made of Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote but losing the electoral count, and how that needs to change. Good luck changing that system, and good luck implementing a parliamentary form of government that would free us from the dastardly two-party system that makes a shambles of democracy. The overlords will allow no such things as long as such trickery insures their continuance.

After I got up and got going today, I spoke on the phone to a friend in Canada who said he and many of his fellow Canadians were in shock over the election results. A large part of their dismay arises from a sense that the Republicans will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but rather accelerate global warming and catastrophic climate change, something Canadians are apparently more informed and concerned about than most Americans.

When I ventured out into the world to take advantage of the 10%-off-everything sale at Harvest Market, I wondered if the vibe in town would be one of sorrow and dismay. The grocery store was doing a brisk business, though there did seem to be a certain solemnity in the air, and I noticed several people gazing into space and slowly shaking their heads.

I came home to a good email from my friend Max in New Hampshire. He had hopeful things to say about how change happens and I was put in mind of when I moved to Sacramento and quickly learned that for those who worked for the state, the worst thing that could happen was the completion of a project.

The name of the game for those working in state government was Get An Extension. I attended several lavish parties thrown to celebrate new two-year and five-year funding extensions on profoundly nonsensical projects. Project completions meant people had to scramble to get repositioned, had to have the right connections, had to start over, and had to struggle for power. Quality and functionality were largely irrelevant in the maintenance of the vast ongoing bureaucracy.

Human systems tend to quickly adopt maintaining-the-status-quo as a top priority. That’s equally true for theatre companies and corporations and governments and public radio stations and universities. Book publishers tend to publish the work of their friends rather than look for new outsider talent. We tend to be most comfortable with the familiar.

Thus human systems can quickly ossify to the point of dysfunction and breakage is often the only way such ossification can be overcome, even if the aftermath of the breakage is messy. Trump’s election breaks many things. The big question is: how will we, the people, deal with the breakage?

A friend emailed from San Francisco, “What’s your take on our family’s new stepdad?”

To which I replied: Things are not looking good for the nation or the planet. More and more I think our collective responses to dire situations speak to the limitations of the human species. I know many intelligent people who equate knowing with doing; but those aren’t really the same things. From my days as a physical laborer, I know that working class people view the world in much different ways than do white collar folk and intellectuals.

For a working class person, life is a fairly straightforward process, though often a struggle, to make enough money for sufficient food and to pay the most pressing bills. Many working class people in America are suspicious of anything labeled socialist because they listen to and believe the Limbaughs who are forever equating socialism with Stalinist communism. Many working class people actually have no idea what socialism is, but many of them responded positively to Bernie Sanders and his socialist ideas because those ideas were about helping everyone, not just the wealthy.

In any case, Bill and Hillary Clinton and their clique of neo-liberals were leaders in implementing policies and laws that ruined the lives of hundreds of millions of working class Americans, and those millions have elected Trump, whoever he turns out to be.

(Todd’s web site is Underthetablebooks.com.)