This is probably not the time, but it has become clear to me I cannot move forward without writing some of this shit down. I know, gentle reader, you may not even exist,much less care what I think, but this is-I’m just telling you right now-self indulgent. Or self care, which sounds less antisocial while often meaning the same thing. Hippies once told me writing everything out was cathartic and meaningful.  Like all things Hippie, that’s half right at best, but I can’t deny it’s not completely bullshit.  So, in no particular order and without any claims to these being the right thoughts for anyone to have or the thoughts I’ll have in 12 hours:

• It’s never one thing, one reason.  130 million people just cooperated on one project.  It’s complicated.
• “How do you explain this to your kids?” I always heard that and understood it, as a childless person, so I don’t understand why I am surprised to learn it is a tough question.  Not because of high moral reasons, because of logistics.   How much will she understand?  What will they be saying in school today?  What exactly have we told her so far and should we build on that or try to scrap it and recontextualize?   When do we do this?  (I did it in the car on the way to drop off because that was the last.possible.moment and it had to be done.  And it has to be done, because the world don’t stop. Plus, those little fuckers watch you like a hawk, constantly, and know how you feel before you admit you feel it.
• It’s going to be...interesting to walk into my community college today, still the only Old White Guy-they added a Young White Guy this semester-among a couple thousand kids from Newark and around the globe.  Anecdotally, 70% of my classmates are either off the boat or the first in their family born on this soil. I asked a classmate from Nigeria why Africans made up so much of the Student Government and club chairpeople.  It’s because they have to defend their visas from time to time and being in SG or clubs makes that review easier. Those are rules that could change in a snap.  I can’t imagine feeling all you and your family have invested to get you an education might turn out to be worthless at the end of next January.
• This site breaking down the exit polls shows there is plenty of blame to go around. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html
• The third party voters are congregated around the young and poor and the old and well off.  It’s hard to blame kids who didn’t live through Reagan and the AIDS crisis.  I’m sure it is unfathomable to them that a sitting president would allow hundreds of thousands deaths right here at home because he didn’t particularly care for the type of folks who were dying.  They weren’t sitting at bar tables in 1999 hearing the same arguments against the cynicism of voting for the lesser of two evils.  They’ve spent their entire conscious lives in a country at war and have no experience of a country in peacetime. Vets without limbs are a normal part of their world. (And we can 3D print the spare parts!)  I can see how they might underestimate the stakes. To them, peacetime is a counterfactual and those are always a hard sell.
• The older, more privileged third party voter?  Well fuck you. You decided to wield your vote as a banner, waving it high and proud before driving that flag into the firm ground of Principle. Ahh, the intoxicating vigor of righteousness!  If in this glorious process the flag happens to-on its way to its home in the warm, smug soil-pierce the downtrodden laid out below you without the means to escape, what of it?  “But-” No. No “but”, no “well…”, no”actually”.  No. No.  Fuck you.  The price of the maintenance on your Platonic ideal is too high. The price is hunger.  The price is suffering, from cold, from preventable illness. The price is human potential wasted by poor education. The price is an economy without rudder or failsafe. The price is blood.  And you knew this.  You’ve seen how this plays out.  And you did it anyway.  So yeah,fuck you.
• As a White Man-and now I’m an Angry Middle Aged White Male!-I am a part of the bogeyman of this election.  But not so fast.  Compared to 2012, Trump gained 5 points in men, but HRC only gained 1 point among women.  Trump beat Romney among blacks, whites, latinos, asians and “others”. Full sweep. A higher percentage of millennials voted Republican this year than in 2012.  There are a lot of eye openers in the chart linked above.
• The split between college educated and non college educated is not a difference between the smart and the dumb, it is a difference in outcomes from the Great Recession. “ 95% of Post-Recession Jobs Went to College Educated: Study”  http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/06/30/418799.htm
• Related to the above, some of the rural/urban split is, in fact, those who refuse to move to where the jobs are.  “You used to be able to make a good living here.”  I know, right?  Well, not for the last 15 years and not for the next,oh...ever.  Those immigrants you hate?  Maybe take a few pointers about moving your ass to where the work is.  
• 15 years of FoxNews is a hell of a drug.
• The only time I get close to misty is thinking about growing up, and the Reagan bullshit, and how Trump will have the support of the other two branches soon enough and how most of the progress made from when I was a kid-and my baby pictures are in black and white-may well be undone and my daughter will have to grow up and get into middle age trying to get to where we were yesterday.  
• The first ad on my twitter feed today was for the upcoming film version of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
• When I was working for Bernie I tried to reach out and communicate the advantages of his way of thinking. We didn't convince enough folks to win. Now it's clear the left needs to reach out to those who will listen and convince them of the advantages of our policy ideas. To find ways to engage those outside our echo chamber. We lost a campaign of hubris.
• Getting people on board with liberal policies is going to have to be done one-to-one. We're not going to get a cable news channel anyone watches. It's hard and boring to convince somebody what is not great for them will be good for everyone which will be great for them. It can be done over coffee, or 30 coffees.  
• If we learn to talk to those we disagree with 90℅ we can find 10℅ of common ground we can build public policy on.
• If you listen to the victory speech of the candidate who won-and I grimaced through it-most of it would be in a Bernie Sanders victory speech.  I know there are people who will read that and lose it. The same people who got angry when I kept saying he was the right candidate to run against Trump.  I honestly believed that and still do and tried to convince people right up to the end of the primaries.  He was the best liked candidate by far, according to the polls.  I think we’ve learned the electorate will forgive a candidate with a populist message for nearly anything.  “They’ll never elect a Democratic Socialist!”   Oh really?  But this sounds like some sort of gloating, which it isn’t. You do what you can do to make progress and the Democratic Party and its nominee, HRC was what I could do and I supported the nominee.
• The massive difference between polls and the results means, it seems to me, a lot of Trump voters wouldn't tell a stranger. That says something.
• HRC was a bad candidate and sunk her own ship.  Wait! Before you unfollow and block me, you don’t have to take my word for it, google the Podesta emails where he and others high up in her campaign are beside themselves at their inability to get Clinton to just air it out with the press once and for all and get it over with, how they can’t believe she didn’t do it immediately, take the heat for a while and have it be old news by this summer.  
• The books by campaign insiders will be legion.
• We have two years to prepare for the midterms.
• If Trump does what he said he'd do to the people he said he'd do it to the tools exist to help them and hinder him.
• How'd the entire polling and press industry miss this, miss the pulse of America outside the cities?  It's hard for me not to think of the thousands of local newspaper reporters we've lost in the last 15 years. Those who replenished the headwaters of information on the state of our country are now writing PR, or  marketing copy, or practicing law.
• The DNC needs a complete purge and the next generation's Trippi. I never thought it was a big deal when the DNC conspired to make it hard for Sanders, that’ what running.against the establishment means. But the last 10 years, below the White House, have been a disaster. Keeping the road clear for HRC to run again has put us in a position where there are zero household name politicians to take the baton in 2020 and that is inexcusable and again a product of hubris. Why groom some kids when you'll have 8 years to do that? We should have a Rubio, a Cruz. That is literally part of their job.  If this were a baseball team it wouldn't just be the manager, you'd know you needed to clean it out all the way down through player development, bring in new thinking.  I've met some unbelievably smart people who were working fairly high up in the Sanders organization and know they had counterparts in the Clinton campaign. There is a 35 year old out there who can do this. Let them