Big News in National City… Winter has come… rain and cooler weather.

Big News in the World…  Donald Trump is the next President of the United States, after all his talk of making America great again by “draining the swamp,” getting the old guard of leaders out of Washington; and as he announces his appointment of a group of very wealthy citizens to move with him into Washington, Trump is sounding and looking more and more like an autocrat who can easily turn into a dictator.  There is at least a bit of irony in the focus on Cuba with the death of Fidel Castro, a man who successfully lead his nation to establish a Communist regime in a land only ninety miles from the U.S. mainland.  As a citizen of the U.S. who has spent four years living outside my homeland and who has traveled all over the world, the death of Castro reminds me that most of my adult life has been lived with an image of Castro looming large over me and over my country. Castro was someone who lived by his socialist ideology always.  He was a dictator who talked tough, who strutted and posed as a tough man in front of the world’s cameras. The man in American politics who looks and sounds most like Castro is the new President-elect, Donald Trump. Donald Trump is positioned on a political line at the opposite end of the line that has had Castro on the other end.  Castro was a dictator.  Trump talks like one, but the system won’t allow him to be one here.

I am one of that large group of U.S. citizens saddened by the election, but I am not dismayed to the point of hoping the new President will fail.  I remember too well President Obama’s beginning of his first term when the Republican members of the Senate said openly that they would make sure the President didn’t succeed.  I am not disillusioned with American democracy.  The election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the world, proves to me that the system under which we live and have our freedom is truly a democracy.  Ours is  democracy that allows even an inadequate citizen to be elected to high office, but after election the elected individual must live according to the laws of the land.  Not all laws are fair.  Not all laws benefit all citizens equally.  All laws, however, must operate under a constitution that protects all citizens, a constitution that was written with the hope and trust that ultimately all citizens are free and protected by laws that are established to guide and monitor our citizenship.  One of the reasons I call myself a Democrat is that I fervently believe all citizens should have health care and education and the other benefits of our democracy whether or not they can individually afford to pay for them.   

Of course, there are times when momentarily a leader misunderstands the limits of his own leadership.  It seems now as if the man who has been elected to the office of president misunderstands some of the guidelines that have been established by laws of the land and he will probably be held back by those laws so our democracy will not only survive but will demonstrate that our Constitution was written by people who knew something about the limits of human beings who are given great power.