And then I wrote...

by Dick Schiling, "Editor Emeritus"

... that a couple readers in the days after the election, noting that I had made some comments about the election over the months, asked what I was going to write about now that the election is over.

I really had no ready answer, but today, a week after the voting, I can say I have at least a few more election comments, because as of today, a certain segment of the population continues to riot in the streets in opposition to the result of the election, and others are advocating a change in the way we elect a president.

That first group is easy to deal with. In the immortal words of one of the recent presidential candidates, “what difference does it make at this point?” The president-elect will become the president in January, if the republic survives.Who are the rioters? A demographic study shows most of them are very young, teens to early 20s. There are a few professional organizers leading them.

Perhaps the most accurate phrase to describe them is moon calves. You can look it up. Maybe the “super” moon in evidence early this week was having an early effect. A Moon for the Misbegotten, as in Eugene O’Neill’s play. In the 1600s, English poet John Milton, in his epic work Paradise Lost, wrote about “demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, and moon-struck madness.”

There were kids skipping high school and college classes, with the approval of their teachers, particularly in The Peoples’ Republic of California and the other left coast states of Oregon and Washington.

Studies have shown that the lobe of the brain which affects decision making is not fully developed in people that age. It shows in the streets these days!

Paradise lost indeed. These are students who as toddlers learned to stomp their feet and threaten to hold their breath until they turned blue so parents would let them have their way.

Socialist Bemie Sanders is among those calling for abolition of the Electoral College. We debated that in high school over 60 years ago. Twice in this century one candidate won the popular vote but lost in the college vote. It is in the constitution for a reason.

“This is supposed to be a democracy” proponents cry. No. It isn’t. It is a republic.

Even more important, these are 50 states, united. The Electoral College makes even small states important, since each gets two votes just for being a state. It works for the benefit of three dozen or more of the 50 states. If success was based on popular vote, only the votes of people in California, New York, Illinois, etc., would count.

The rest of us would be ignored to an even greater extent than we now are.

If the election was an upset, I am prepared to eat crow in the wake of Iowa’s football upset victory over Michigan. Who’d have thought!