Not so golden results

The 2016 campaigns and election are finally over, thank God. Not since the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, has a post-election America been more divided. Seldom has more debate, protest and howling been subsumed with so little nourishment or constructive results.
So, can we now get back to fixing our local potholes, pension problems, tax fractures and bruised and battered psyches? Just how far off course has this 2016 experience in frayed democracy taken us?
This demoralizing picture is not only about the Trump-Clinton aftermath. California’s government looks like business as usual. Dark money and private lobbyists were the overall 2016 election “deciders” and citizen-voters were the losers.
Sonoma County’s board of supervisors has a new balance of power but the mixed election results may allow them to keep kicking the can down the road over pension reform and road repairs. After $1 million spent on a name-calling race in the county’s Fifth District, how can we expect new transparency and honest talk about our ever-increasing local taxes?
What role models or positive themes can our newly elected city and school leaders find to listen and lead, deliver services and make us proud to pay our taxes?
As muddled as most of the 2016 election results were, it’s oddly illuminating that the biggest progress in new laws and public policy was over marijuana. It’s clear that cannabis is now a permanent part of all our conversations, parenting choices, business thinking and land use decisions.
Worse than a hangover, this election’s sour cocktail promises to upset our stomachs and minds for months or years to follow. Both Clinton and Trump voters now say “hair of the dog” might chase away our nation’s whirligigs. Others are prescribing more harsh measures like collective chemotherapy or a national lobotomy.
Let’s not go there, OK? If our country needs a new direction and really strong medicine, we need a better way to diagnose our mental state and national health.
The 2016 election exposed powerful poisons. Some of these were deep strains of racism and intolerance. America also suffers from obesity, laziness and anti-intellectualism. These have led to lapsed family values, economic injustice and mass voter ignorance.
We have lost touch with our great past and will be doomed to suffer an even more toxic election in 2020 if we don’t start taking our medicine.
As demoralized as the 2016 election story may leave us, where would we be without past elections that brought us the Eisenhower post-war boom era of the 1950s or the Civil Rights and Great Society programs of the 1960s? California was made golden during this same era by an expansion of public enterprises in free colleges and libraries, hydro and highway projects, new industry, jobs and housing programs.
But all that was before we got lazy and obese. We have allowed those great social programs to expire. We no longer seek welfare for some and more equal taxes for all. These American precepts like our one-time pride and investments in our public infrastructure are now being defamed as “big government.”
If we Americans have a big problem with our local or federal government and we are divided by all kinds of cultural, political and personal differences what could possibly be big enough to solve it all?
The answer is the same one Roosevelt’s New Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier, Johnson’s Great Society and Reagan’s Morning in America were all based upon. (You can look up the answer in the U.S. Constitution.)
Meanwhile, welcome to our obese and obsessed America, right now feeling ungolden and unglorious.
— Rollie Atkinson