Alive and Well in America

There is one week to go in the Presidential election and candidates are making their last pitch to the American people. The only thing the race of 2016 has proved to me is that racism, xenophobia, and misogyny are alive and well in our country. And I am not just talking about the Republican nominee for President. The Democrats also have been sexist without perhaps even knowing it.

We know who Donald Trump is. He doesn’t even try to hide it anymore. He has attacked and demeaned immigrants, blacks, Muslims and particularly women. His campaign has brought to light some of the uglier tendencies of our society and

in many ways has brought it into the main stream of political thought. The fact that here, one week out, and he is not being wiped out is testament to the fact that a large portion of our society holds similar views. But what about the Democrats? Surely, the Dems are more tolerant of people of different races and creeds but gender bias is still deeply rooted in our culture. What? I hear some of you saying, we have a female nominee for President for the first time in our history. How can you level a charge of gender bias on the Democrats. That’s the thing. I believe it is so ingrained in our collective psyche that we don’t even recognize it.

Hillary Clinton is the most qualified person to ever have run for the Presidency, period. There is little dispute to that fact. I contend that in order to have gotten this far, she would have to be. Many on the right call her a crook and a liar but the facts just don’t support that assertion. Mrs. Clinton is and has been the political establishment’s worst nightmare for over thirty years; a woman with ambition. to that end, her political opponents have been investigating and ridiculing her for decades. What have they uncovered in their years of probing? That’s right, nothing. In many ways our society has not progressed that much from the 1950’s when women should be seen and not heard, a help-mate to their husbands. As long as women stay in the kitchen (or the bedroom) and not make waves and certainly not talk about substantive issues, they are fine. Wake up America. Women are taking over the world and I, for one, don’t think it’s a bad thing. The men have surely screwed it up enough. The one other thing I will say about Democratic misogyny; can anyone truly look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that Hillary Rodham would be the Democratic nominee if her husband had not been President himself? It’s almost like a built in acceptance that she would not have otherwise. Almost like we can trust her because if things get real, she will have Bill to fall back on who as we know was President for eight years already. I don’t necessarily blame people for this view, it is “baked in” if you will to our culture. Women as the weaker sex and all that crap. I am here to tell you that it just isn’t true. Women are just as capable and just as skilled and in many cases better able to govern than men are. Women tend to have an empathy and an innate fairness that men do not possess. That innate fairness is, what I predict, will make Hillary Clinton one of the greatest Presidents we have ever had and hopefully eight years from now we will look back and wonder what took us so long.

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