Check back at 7 a.m.

   
    A million years ago, last week, I was cleaning out some file drawers in my office, looking for an editorial I wrote 13 years ago about the Cubs, and I found a few of these flags which, a century ago, on Tuesday, suddenly became relevant. 
    At the same time, I also visited a place I looked at and thought, "That would make an intriguing Saturday Fun Activity, if, you know, I still did that."
    Which I totally can, since I run the ship. So, inspired by the happy union of prize and photo, I'm returning the contest, at least for today. And if you remember the Fun Activity, it posts at 7 am., to give people who aren't insomniacs a chance to win.
    So check back at 7 a.m., and I'll have the photo up. It's probably really guessable, and my hunch is, you could use the flag.  
    Though to be honest, Trump is already backpedaling on ObamaCare. And so it begins. Still, a flag like this could come in handy.

Twelve things to do before you kill yourself

     The volume of calls to suicide prevention hotlines doubled Wednesday, as blue Americans tried to wrap their heads around the fact that the United States of America had elected an ignorant, cruel bigot as president. And I admit, just the words “Rudolph Giuliani, attorney general” are enough to make a guy want to jump off a tall building.
     Not to joke about something so serious — unless joking helps, then go for it. The bottom line is, if you’re plunged into despair by the election results, then you’re also the kind of person our country needs most. Stick around, now it gets really interesting. Toward that end, I offer a dozen activities for those who might be thinking about ending it, or for anyone gaping in horror at this week’s alarming turn of events.
     1. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255, if you’re genuinely suicidal. They have a special line for veterans, and also take calls in Spanish.
     2. Call your friends. You may not be contemplating ending it all, yet still need bucking up. Nothing loosens a knot of dread like talking with others. When I heard of those reacting to the results by weeping, vomiting or rushing to the hospital with chest pains, my own reaction — a kind of grim numbness — didn’t seem so extreme.

     3. Weep. Nothing like a good cry cleanses your soul. Here's a line from Harriet Beecher Stowe to prime the pump: "This horror, this nightmare abomination! Can it be in my country! It lies like lead on my heart, it shadows my life with sorrow."
     4. Expand your horizons. The above written in 1853 about slavery. This isn't the first time the United States chose evil. The idea that brutality arrives with Donald Trump is quaint. From eradicating Native Americans and enslaving black people, from Vietnam and Guantanamo Bay, we've been there, done that. Read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."
     5. Wait. Time is an essential healing quality. Remember that two key elements of Trump's success are disloyalty and mendacity: he won't necessarily follow the whims of those who elected him. Nor will he do what he promised. He might be the best liberal Democratic president ever. Today is Nov. 11. Circle the 18th - one week from today. A lot can happen in a week. One week ago the city was celebrating the Cubs' victory. Who knows what next week could bring?
     6. Go to Margie's Candies, 1960 N. Western Ave. Order the Jumbo Hot Fudge Atomic Sundae. Only $7.95 plus tax. Also order two jars of their home-made hot fudge sauce—$6.55 plus tax. Keep one in the fridge and take two tablespoons at the onset of election-related misery. Give the other to someone who needs is. Acts of kindness always help.
     7. Get healthy. Nothing like a good workout/run/yoga session to get the endorphins flowing.
     8. Help Planned Parenthood. Either by giving money or, ideally, volunteering. Trump has vowed to cut their funding. Regular citizens will have to take up the slack.
     9. Subscribe to a newspaper. Trump is all about undermining what's left of American journalism. Don't let him. Get the paper at home—each copy is a universe, containing worlds. Three months of the Sun-Times is $56.94. A lot cheaper than therapy.
     10. Learn Spanish. The country will be 28 percent Hispanic in 2060 no matter what Trump does. It'll come in handy. Here's your first sentence: "¡Rápido! ¡Aquí! ¡Te esconderé!" (RRRRAH-pee-doh! Ah-KEY! Tay ess-KON-deRAY!) Translation: "Quick! In here! I'll hide you!"
     11. Fly the flag. I thought about furling mine and putting it away for the next four years. But that would cede patriotism to those who abuse it. The pride of this country isn't in that it never made a mistake. The pride of this country is that it acknowledges errors and fights to correct them. This is one big ass error that America is going to need every right-minded citizen to correct.
     12. If all else fails, ignore it for a while. Polls show that 30 percent of Americans at any given time can't name the vice president. Join them. Focus on music, flower arranging, Scrabble, whatever floats your boat. Take a break. The whole nightmare will still be waiting when you get back. And you will get back, because our country needs you, now more than ever.

They dare return us to the old slavery

    The dog still needed to be walked Wednesday morning, as always. She didn't know it had been a late night, or who was just elected president. Snapping her collar on, and plunging out into the chilly morning about 6:30 a.m. felt normal. The leaves were colorful, the air crisp, the sun rising. The world was still here.
     Okay, I thought. We'll manage this. He can't really build the wall—unnecessary, vastly expensive and logistically insane. Start deporting those 11 million undocumented immigrants and the crops rot in the field. Dial back gay marriage? Can you really unring that bell? Umm yes. His vice president kicked a hole in the Indiana economy trying to do just that. Has that kind of right ever in the history of the United States been extended, and then a few years alter snatched back? "Sorry ladies, guess you won't be voting after all!!!" 
     Bargaining. That's what, Stage 3 on the Kubler-Ross grief scale? I seem to have skipped over No 1, denial—can't very easily deny this Hieronymus Bosch painting, transpiring in glorious red and blue before my eyes, with the New York Times real time win-prediction meter starting deep in Hillary territory then pinning itself for Trump. Denying the outcome would be like denying the sky because  it's stormy. It's right there, big as life, every time you look at it. A mighty nation brought low. Mass folly.
     At home, coffee was still here. Cafe du Monde. The papers arrived, freezing the midnight moment when the balance had not yet completely swung Donald Trump's way.
     I wonder if there'll be papers at all in 2020?
     Of course the world wasn't really, there, not the world as it had been the day before. By the time I got back, the emails were showing up.
    "I guess it's time to head back to Israel and get drunk..."
     And the phone calls.
     "You fucking kike Democrat boot-licker phony fucking journalist. I'm laughing at you, you faggot!"
     Trump fans reaching out to bind up our divided country. Adding their undervalued perspective to the national conversation.
     Phone numbers come up now when people call -- they don't realize that -- and in my pre-coffee fog, I phone one back, under the quaint notion that he would regret the bile so easily spilled into my voicemail. "Wrong," as the president-elect likes to say. Which did give the chance to leap back to Kubler-Ross Stage No. 2, anger, because it's infectious, and when somebody starts screaming at you, you tend to give back in kind. Mental note to self: don't call people back. Don't answer emails. Let them have their moment, ululating over the fraud whose lies they bought. They'll have time to regret what they've done.
     Or not. He'll just lie some more and tell them how wonderfully he's done, like they do in Russia.
     Though to be honest, the reader response was not really worse than could be gotten on any given day pre-Trump. We can't blame him for the vileness in the American soul. He didn't create it, it was already there. He just weaponized it, monetized it, for himself. Turning anger into political capital he could spend to buy the White House.
     The White House. Suddenly I saw those elementary school placemats with the presidents. Postage stamps. Those future kids, yet unborn, proudly memorizing the presidents, starting with, "Washington, Jefferson, Adams..." ending "Bush, Obama, Trump" and then whatever godawful specimen comes next. Because as bad as this is, it'll only get worse. Or not. We'll all get used to it, and it'll just be the Way Things Are. The pit-of-the-stomach dread of today—like somebody died—will just be a historical artifact, half trivial, half amusing, grandpa putting on a black armband when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected. Thought he was a tyrant.
     They say in American anyone can grow up to become president. Now we know what that really means.
    I called my parents.
    "How could people vote for someone like that?" said my father, 84. "He made fun of people with disabilities. And people could vote for him. It says something about our country, that's for sure."
     Yes it does dad.
    My mother, 80, got on the phone, all defiance, explaining that this simply means the first woman president will be Elizabeth Warren.
    "Dad and I will still be here in 2020," she said, "and we'll live to see that day."
    I sure hope so mom, I said.
     "How could this person be the president of our land?" she said.
Can't answer that one, mom.
    "I'm wearing all black today and reading 'Confederacy of Dunces,'" she continued.
     That's a plan. Mourn and amuse ourselves. The last Kubler-Ross stage is acceptance. This is what happened. The pieces of the vase cannot be glued back together. Is that acceptance? Or complacency, normalization? He'll be president, yes, but that doesn't mean we have to accept anything he tries to do: Barack Obama never got that courtesy. Acceptance is a luxury we can't really afford right now, a sort of privilege. Being Jewish, my rights won't be plucked away as fast as others' rights will--women, Hispanics, Muslims. But tying yourself into a knot of anguish won't help anybody.
     Which is one way of viewing it. Another is that we may have lost the battle, but not the war.
    The keening was endless on Facebook. I added David Remnick's mournful analysis, An American Tragedy, and Eric Zorn's excellent, grim, assessment, Can America Survive President Donald Trump? Spoiler alert: no.
    I posted my column, of course, the fourth written Tuesday, as events unfolded. And then, prompted by some essential rebellious gene, the La Marseillaises scene from "Casablanca," where the German occupiers singing "Watch on the Rhine" in Rick's Cafe are drown out by the French National Anthem. Something uplifting, defiant and apt, particularly the lines from the second verse, which they never get to, "C'est nous qu'on ose méditer/De rendre à l'antique esclavage!" 
   Or in English:  "It is us they dare plan/To return to the old slavery!"
   Mike Pence might lull himself to sleep thinking about cramming gays back in the closet. Donald Trump might have based his campaign on making every Hispanic citizen a suspected illegal alien, on defunding health care for poor women, or stuffing the Supreme Court with justices who'll dial back women's rights 50 years. He might have been carried to the presidency on the shoulders of the most motley band of alt-right haters to ever dart blinking into the sunlight, their ranks augmented by the grumbling dispossessed who'll swallow any flattering lies and don't sweat the details. But this isn't done yet, and they can't just start shredding modern life, not while free American citizens have a say about it. He'll be president, not king, and though he has Congress at his bidding, the struggle has not ended. It has only begun.  Allons enfants de la Patrie!

Abandon all audacity of hope, ye who enter here

     Donald Trump won.
     An incredible turn of events which, when you pull back and look at the globe this past year, makes a grim sense. We should have seen this coming. Maybe we did see it, but it was so incredible we couldn’t believe the evidence of our eyes.
     Across the world, globalism is in retreat. Great Britain dropped out of the European Union in June. The Philippines elected a murderous madman as president, in the form of Rodrigo Duterte, who promptly began to fulfill his promise to kill drug dealers and drug users.
     Like it or not, the United States is part of that world.
     Seven years since the end of the worst recession since the Great Depression, Americans lost patience with the old politics. With regular politicians. And elected a man who violated all the usual norms, gleefully, without consequence. Howard Dean yelped and his candidacy was dead. Trump famously declared that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose one vote. He did about everything else but fire that shot, insulting, in no particular order, Mexicans, POWs, women, Muslims…it might be easier to list the people he didn’t malign.
     Now he’s our president-elect.
     On Monday, Trump said in Scranton, Pennsylvania, “You have one day to make every dream you’ve ever dreamed for your country and your family come true.”

     And the country believed him.
      A stunning repudiation of Barack Obama and everything his administration stood for — his cerebral approach, his inclusiveness, his care for immigrants, for health care. “The Audacity of Hope.” All out the window now.    
     Any minority, particularly Hispanics, Muslims and Jews, who have been feeling increasingly frightened by Trump's embrace of the "alt-right"—a motley of heretofore obscure haters and far right reactionaries—can't help but be even more afraid now. What will our future be like?
     The presidency of the United States of America is the first elective office that Donald Trump has ever held. While that was true for a number of U.S. presidents, they were either military men, like Andrew Jackson or Dwight Eisenhower, or held appointed public offices, like William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover. Donald Trump is sui generis, a figure unprecedented in American history.
     For now, the markets will plunge—500 points in Dow futures last time I looked—the world will gape in shock. And we will get to see just what Donald Trump will actually do. Will he build that wall? He promised to. Will he start deporting 11 million undocumented Hispanic immigrants? He vowed he would. Temporarily bar Muslims from entering the country? He suggested that, too.
     Nations have stood at the crossroads before. In 1932, the United States elected Franklin D. Roosevelt and Germany elected Adolf Hitler. The results don't need to be elaborated upon here.
     The polls were wrong. Hillary Clinton led most of them, for months. She won every poll of the American people except the one that counted.
     Trump is a man who has never run a city, never mind a state, never mind a country. Who deals in crude generalities, who makes promises that not only can't he keep, but also that can't be kept.
     Trump promised to "Make America Great Again." The slogan implied, directly, that we were no longer great. That our greatness had been stolen by invading Mexicans, by—get used to hearing the phrase, because he promised to say it a lot—radical Islamic terrorism. By job-snatching Chinese and untrustworthy Europeans. And that global conspiracy of bankers.
     Hillary Clinton argued that our greatness was in our diversity, that we were "Stronger Together." But Clinton lost, and Trump won. What that means we will begin to understand in the weeks and months and years to come. It would be overly dramatic and premature to say that the light that America held to the world has gone out, dowsed by electing an unashamed bigot and demagogue. But it sure is flickering, for a lot of people, the ones who aren't rejoicing tonight.
     I predicted this at the end of September. Just as I wish I had been wrong about his winning, I hope I'm wrong about the dire results. He was a Democrat once. Maybe he'll go back to being a Democrat. In his second term. I suppose I should leave you with some words of comfort. We are still the United States of America. We survived the British burning our capital and a Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II, the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks. We'll survive this too, somehow. Buckle your seat belts, it's going to get bumpy.
     And Donald. Guess the system wasn't rigged after all, eh?

21 things that are true no matter who is elected president

     The presidential race was still too close to call at our first deadline Tuesday night. But that doesn’t mean we can’t draw conclusions from this most dramatic, historic and vexing race.

1. Why is it surprising that this ordeal just won’t end? The election was very close, revealing not only a divided country, but an evenly divided country. No wonder we have such difficulty getting anything done. Half the country wants to move this way, half that. Of course we’re being torn apart. The once-great United States is like a two-headed horse in some shabby vaudeville review.

2 Global warming, health care and immigration are still huge problems. We just held an 18-month presidential campaign and barely discussed what to do, except float a few diametrically opposed bullet points: build a wall, create a path to citizenship.

3. If Trump wins, his foes can take comfort in the fact that he is erratic — he calls it “unpredictable.” He proposes and abandons policies, makes promises and then denies he ever made them, with blinding speed. We really don’t know what he’d do.

4. If Clinton wins, well, her foes can take comfort in the fact that she’ll have to reach out to them to get anything done. The question is how vigorously she’ll be spurned by disappointed Republicans. If history is any judge, really vigorously.

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Election day, 2016

     This is the 13th presidential election in my memory, not counting being irked that the 1964 Republican convention pre-empted "Mr. Magoo." So starting with the 1968 battle between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, the first contest I really noticed in detail, one where, at age 8, I insisted my parents take me to the Berea, Ohio Humphrey headquarters so I could snag a campaign button, which I still have.

Candidate cookies, Bennison's Bakery, Evanston

     And true to its unlucky #13 status, this election has been, by far, the most jinxed, sordid, troubling , jaw-dropping affair of the baker's dozen, if not in the wide sweep of American history, for reasons that hardly need to be articulated at this point. I read one pundit who, trying to argue that it wasn't the ugliest campaign ever, reached back to the 1800 battle between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, which isn't exactly a compelling case for this election's ordinariness.  
    But now, at the end, or the end of this part anyway, a bit of summation is in order. Where to begin? From Trump descending the escalator at his namesake Manhattan tower to call Mexican immigrants rapists — the hook set deep in the mouth of the media that left them flailing on the line from that point on — to the motley crew of 16 GOP debaters, to the passionate Bernie Sanders insurgency, to the chill figure of Hillary Clinton who, alone among them all, seemed to understand what this was about: choosing someone to run the government of the United States of America, not break further it apart.
     The Republicans have been locked in a 30-year trench war to tear down that government, brick-by-brick, ever since Ronald Reagan taught them that if society changes so much that you can't directly oppress the people you hate, you can kneecap the government that helps those people and and lower your taxes in the bargain. They've been sliding down this chute for decades, only to plop at the feet of Donald Trump and sedition.
    Trump was the last man standing at the Republican pygmy wrestle-off, and the GOP, to its deathless shame, more or less lined up behind him, the Bushes notwithstanding—and really, names like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney and the word  "valor" don't usually belong in the same sentence, but now they do. 
    Donald Trump. So much has been said about him it seems overkill even to type his name at this point. Bigot. Fraud. Liar. Misogynist. Bully. I will go to my grave marveling that a man like John McCain can be directly slurred, and see all American servicemen in general and POWs in particular mocked and dismissed, and support the guy anyway. It defies understanding.  
   Bigot. Fraud. Liar. It's a shame the GOP has already worn out slurs by hurling them willy-nilly at their opponents, because they ring hollow now when justly applied. Trump had a way of echoing back any charge directed at him, an "I'm rubber, you're glue" stunt that, alas, was only one of the many juvenile aspects of this Schoolyard Election. 
     It's like the Hitler analogy -- it's been overused to much, that when you finally get a guy who talks like Hitler, passing around Nazi -- whoops, "alt-right"—paranoid fantasies as fact, raving about international conspiracies and grasping bankers, it's only good for an eye roll. Oh that again?  You become the Boy Who Cried Wolf. And there was some debate whether he was more of a fascist buffoon, like Mussolini, than an actual menace, like Hitler, though that would depend if the man achieves power or not. Still, it is an apt comparison; Trump allowed the lowest rung of anti-Semites to hoist him upon their shoulders, merely grinning at the attention. He even has his own Goering/Goebbels, fat/thin duo of fawning underlings in the shrill, gaunt, fist-pounding Rudolph Guiliani and the ever-sniveling lardbag Chris Christie. 
     Though to be honest, nothing Trump said sparked quite the visceral disgust as on Monday, when he said, "You have one day to make every dream you ever dreamed for your country and your family come true." 
    By voting for him of course. Trust drop into daddy's arms and he'll take care of everything 
    No programs. No plans. He never explained how he was going to do any of this, because of course he won't. It's all snake oil and bullshit. And Americans lapped it up. As awful as Trump is, you can't blame him — he didn't create these people, he just goaded them on, drew them out. The blame is ours. A freedom loving people. Howling to be enslaved.
     Clinton seems to be winning -- she preserved her narrow lead in all the polls-- but Nate Silver still gives Trump a  35 percent chance of winning, which is better odds than the chance of tossing a coin and getting heads twice.
    Not that a Clinton victory will end the dark forces that Trump has so skillfully summoned. They were there all along, and now in blinking the light and normalized, they'll batter even more relentlessly at the foundations of our government and society. Maybe if Trump's defeat is massive enough, they'll go slink back under their rocks. But I doubt it. Assuming he isn't elected president—and I'll exhale only after he isn't—how could we have come this close? Any joy at Hillary's election will have to be mitigated by the grotesque sight of what's under the rock Trump kicked over. The only comfort: they were already there. Trump didn't create them, he only exploited them. Not a cause, as I've been saying for a year, but a symptom. Being the folks who believe in facts and science, we can't decry the fact that we are now aware of this noxious reality. As Sarah McLachlan sings, "Better I should know."
   And if Trump wins? Well, then bar the door, Katie. We sail off the edge of the world, outdoing Britain which dropped out of the European Union with a thud last June, throwing away economic prosperity in terror at the prospect of Turkish immigrants.. I don't know what the country will look like then, but it will be dark for four years, if not forever. It's hard to imagine, and I'd prefer not to. We don't have to worry at this point, all we have to do is wait for a few more hours and we'll find out.

"My Christian duty is to not support evil"

Trinity Christian College students Zach Fitch, Josh Coldagelli and Karlyn Boens discuss their choices for president.

     So how to end this awful campaign? I did not feel like thundering against Trump—I've been beating that drum for a year and a half. One more thump won't make a difference. I prefer to yield the floor to someone who isn't me, and evangelical students seem a good way to understand whatever it is that's going to happen on Election Day.

     As a former editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal, my first impulse was to call Wheaton College. But the administration there, still curled up in a defensive ball over the school's shameful canceling of its students' health insurance (because ObamaCare was requiring it offer contraception), and their cack-handed fumble of a professor who put her religious faith into practice by wearing a hijab in solidarity with beleaguered Muslims, refused to cooperate. "I don't know we would do that," their director of media relations sniffed. "We don't usually facilitate that kind of thing."    

    So I shrugged, sidestepped the administration entirely and used this Internet machine to start rounding up Wheaton students directly. Then Trinity Christian College, which obviously doesn't have the shame issues that Wheaton labors under, said, in essence, "C'mon by!" and I spent a pleasant hour with their thoughtful, articulate students and then a second hour wandering the campus. This column suffers from space constraints in the paper—I would have liked room to more fully bring out the students' thinking, which was more nuanced than I could relate here, and touch upon some of the more interesting elements of campus, such as the existence of an Ozinga Chapel, named for a patriarch of the well-known concrete company, who was one of the businessmen who got together in the late 1950s and bought the former Navajo Hills golf club and turned it into a Christian college—the old clubhouse is now the administration building. Another day.

     Zach Fitch, 20, a junior at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, views Donald Trump as a deeply flawed candidate. But he’s voting for him anyway.
     “He says ridiculous things, sometimes really inappropriate things,” said Fitch. “Yet, I’d rather have somebody right now who is a little more toward my beliefs — he doesn’t like abortion. I feel like he’s my more evangelical vote. I would like somebody better, but God can change anyone.”
     Geena Calomino, 21, a senior at Trinity, drawing upon the same faith, finds that impossible.
     “As my first election, I feel horrible that I have to decide between these two candidates, because I don’t agree with what they’re doing, either of them,” she said. “But I cannot and I will not support someone who puts down women and makes fun of the disabled. . . . To have a president or presidential candidate who openly does that is horrifying to me.”
     The American public, exhausted by the 2016 presidential election, finally collapses across the finish line Tuesday. Having written dozens of columns parsing every aspect of this bitter and historic race, I decided not to add one more voice telling voters what to do. But rather to yield the field to young people, grounded in a particular morality, and see what illumination they might offer. So however the vote falls, we might better understand what just happened. On Friday, while the city was celebrating the Cubs victory, I visited this 1,200-student college in the southwestern suburbs. The administration gathered a half dozen students. Each took a different approach. Josh Coldagelli, 21, a senior, won’t vote for anyone....

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