i've lived through the terms of 10 presidents and a forced-birth fanatic might say through the terms of 11 since i was in utero during the final days of the eisenhower administration. i have read extensively the history of this country and its presidents and their policies for the entire history of the country with an emphasis on the u.s. civil war and reconstruction and the post wwii period. i have been a rational, thoughtful consumer of news and primary documents of the presidents of my lifetime starting 43 years ago when i was 12.

of all the presidents of my lifetime, obama ranks as the very best of the entire bunch. despite his flaws, some of which are the flaws of our entire government which were baked into the cake well before he was elected senator from illinois or even born, he is the best president i have personally experienced. if there is still a united states in 50 years i believe he will be ranked among the five or six best presidents in the history of the country
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i deeply regret his departure from office and would do so even if he were being succeeded by clinton, or sanders, or webb, or chafee, or o'malley. i die a little inside that he is being succeeded by such a monstrous little man that is to mislead the country for the next four to eight years. i deeply hope that he will be less horrific than i envision but i find i cannot count on being able to recognize my country by the end of his tenure however long that is.
my passport is up-to-date and i can take my retirement after one more year of teaching if it becomes necessary to emigrate. i plan to protest and lobby, i plan to stand with the underserved and repressed and to use every ounce of my white, male privilege to get as much access as i can muster to fight for those who are despised and abused and ignored in the america to come.

i bid a sad goodbye to a man who has served us well and is going out with style and grace.

i am a lifelong left-liberal democrat, or at least since i was able to think with logic and manipulate abstractions so call it 43 of 56 years. i am also a 7th or 8th generation texas native. i have been dealing with people with vastly different ways of seeing the world for a long time. even though i am now a decided agnostic i was raised in a fairly conservative church until i was 16 and i am able to understand and speak in terms of what i call southern christianity. my practice when speaking to people with different opinions was to find some area of common ground and see how far i could move them by incremental and logical steps pitched in the language of politics or social thinking they used. there have been times i have been able to move people much farther than they, or even i, had expected. even if we did not agree in the end our discussions tended to remain amicable. sometimes during the course of a discussion i would find that i was questioning an opinion or a belief of mine. one notable example was in a conversation about religion i found that my initial stance of atheism made no sense and i moved to a position of agnosticism.

over the past 20 years i have found this approach becoming difficult if not impossible to put into practice. starting during the run-up to the impeachment of clinton my interlocutors have been less and less willing to agree to common ground and much more likely to immediately gainsay any attempt to move from one point of agreement to some new incremental position. over the past 10 years i have encountered more and more people who will repeat the most ridiculous lies as long as they heard it on fox news. even when confronted with information from sources they would normally respect they often refuse to back away from the lie or only grudgingly, and usually sullenly, accept that perhaps what they had quoted might have been in error. it has been enormously frustrating trying to maintain a calm and even demeanor when faced with someone who is willing to just make shit up. over the course of the obama years i have begun to encounter people who will decry me as unamerican, as a liberal fascist, as a goddamn asshole, for even trying to take a position different from tea party republicanism. my feelings about these folks tend more towards pity that contempt but those who have earned my contempt have truly earned it. there truly are a lot of deplorable if not despicable people who supported donald trump. many of them are in my family and i know very well the racism and contempt for the poor that lay in the background of their support for trump. just since he began campaigning in earnest i've witnessed more people using racial epithets in public than i have seen during the rest of my adult life. two days after the election some student in the sixth grade hall of my school stuffed notes in most of the hispanic kids lockers that read "president trump will send you back to mexico, start packing." i haven't seen anything like that in 22 years of teaching. i have devoted much of my life to trying to win the hearts and minds of those around me or at least to foster a willingness to accept differing points of view. these days i have to throw my hands up and then hunker down to try to ride out the gathering storm but i fear for my country in a way i have not done before.

thank you for the info.

mr. bellmore frequently argued in bad faith, erected enough straw men to create a straw brigade, and showed an unfortunate tendency to disregard the humanity of those who were not part of his immediate set. what started my asking about him was my concern for his well-being not a desire to read his opinions, although i'm sure he would have a pungently idiosyncratic take on things. his disappearance from this site seemed contemporaneous with his disappearance from facebook and after a little digging i noted that his wife has posted nothing to her facebook since august. whether we agree or not we're all human and it seemed worrisome that he was missing.

thank you so much mr. wimberly. i hope that all is well.

i know this may sound a bit like i'm asking for trouble but why haven't we heard anything from the bellmore perspective? i had assumed after weeks had gone by with no new comments from him that he finally got banned but then i saw someone else asking about him in a prior thread. i checked his facebook page and it has seen no new activity since late june. does anyone have a contact number or email for him in the real world to find out if he's alright? he can be an execrable and tendentious interlocutor but he's still a real person and i have no desire for harm to come to him.

when it became fairly clear that trump would be the nominee i knew that i would need someone to point to as a democratic candidate i could not possibly vote for with a clear conscience. in the end, i use rob blagojevich running from his prison cell and making blatant deals exchanging appointments to executive department secretaries and undersecretaries as well as major embassies for campaign contributions and endorsements. there is no way in hell i would vote for him. i'd probably be working to get alyson kennedy on the ballot in texas if the democrats had nominated rob.

you folks can delete this comment after you read it and reply to me via my email address. i'm just curious, did brett bellmore get banned? if so, when and why? it's just that i've seen several posts come up to which he would certainly have something to say and there's been no sign of it.

consider a veteran of multiple tours of duty during the iraq war is going to college and finding himself rooming in the dorms with an antiwar protester who harangues him every evening when he gets in with diatribes against the military. is it asking too much that his dorm room be a safe space from arguments of that nature?

also male elementary teachers are pressured to go into administration almost as soon as they start teaching. it took 8 years in my school district to convince them i wanted to stay in the classroom rather than became a principal. over that time i watched 9 men who taught in the elementary grades in my district move into administrative jobs so that out of 6 principal positions and 10 assistant principal positions in the elementary and intermediate grades 14 of those are filled by men and only one of the females is a principal. i think this was one of the five most offensive and uninformed posts mr. bellmore has ever made.