Dear Fellow Americans;

Weary-eyed, teary-eyed, satisfied, or mystified, our citizens and our electoral college have elected a new president. Without offering any substance, detail, or basic elementary outline for how he will be able to deliver on the promises that have been broken for so long, this man won an election on a guarantee that he would make America great again, bring jobs back to this country, and that he – alone – would break up the corruption in government. “Believe me.”

He tapped into the deeply-rooted burning anger of the long forgotten electorate, the downtrodden whose elected officials had been re-elected BY US again and again without accountability and without punishment for rewarding only the special interests instead of doing what is right for us. On election night 2016, Trump voters (as Michael Moore so eloquently predicted in his movie “TrumpLand”) utilized the electoral process as an anger management tool, electing this man – this completely untested and (by all means, if you ask his former business partners) untrustworthy man – to the highest office in the nation as a means to blow up our political system. The reason, we were told, was because the alternative was “corrupt” and he wasn’t.

Well, at least not in politics, I would remind you.

Americans, we own this outcome. ALL OF US do. A dysfunctional government happens when we re-elect the same politicians for three, four, five, and six terms so they have become so far disconnected from their constituency they become accountable only to the protective “bubble” of the D.C. Beltway. A dysfunctional government happens when we sit back and watch the House and Senate make rules that they cannot even vote on a bill unless they know ahead of time the majority Party would pass it, and we do nothing to stop them. A dysfunctional government happens when we fail to call, write, visit, text, or Tweet our elected officials when they are not passing or repealing legislation that impacts us directly at home. A dysfunctional government happens when our elected officials spend 90% of their time making calls to and asking for money from donors and special interests, and only 10% of their time on issues that help their constituents.

Side note….

            Dear Congress, in case you need a reminder:

                 We are your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
We’ve sent us, the homeless, tempest-tost to thee,
…But you did not lift your lamp beside your golden door…

And so, the angry, forgotten, huddled masses yearning to breathe free have spoken.

However, one man – Donald Trump – is not a savior. He alone will not fix this. To all of you who voted for him, who thought he was going to be the cure for corruption…you as a voting bloc own him now. For your collective sake, and for our sake as a country, I hope you were right that this man is miraculously free from corruption. But if he ends up being as big of a mess as he seemed to be during this clown show campaign free from any level of political discourse, then please do not pretend. HOLD HIM ACCOUNTABLE for what he promised us – jobs, a better economy, better health care, better schools, income equality, and equal pay for equal work. Let’s not make this worse over the next four years and let’s actually fix something. TOGETHER.

It’s what we all want. We aren’t enemies. We aren’t “the others”. We are Americans.

So let’s act like it.

All due respect,

-Swing State Voter