John Williams and Steve Bertrand from WGN Radio along with Eric Zorn and Kristen McQueary from the Chicago Tribune talk about the trouble that some people have accepting President-elect Trump. They discuss the anti-Trump protestors and the anxiety that minorities and immigrants are feeling. They also discuss the promises that Trump has made and which ones he should be held accountable for. They share what they want Donald Trump to do in his first 100 days.
Recommendations:
John Williams recommends The New Yorker article – What’s in a Brand Name
Steve Bertrand recommends The Crown on Netflix.
Kristen McQueary recommends reading the Aaron Schock indictment.
Eric Zorn recommends reading Mary Schmich’s column that would have run on the front page if Hillary Clinton would have won:
This is the column that would have run in the Tribune today if the vote had gone a different way. Because the deadlines are hard, I was asked to write it before the vote was in. It was ready if Hillary won. It’s a vision of an alternative universe, where she did. It will never run anywhere but here. It says some things I’d hoped to say.
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President Hillary Clinton.
Finally, 240 years after the founding of this country, after 43 men in charge, a woman.
After three Georges, four Johns, three Williams and a Bill. After two Andrews, two Franklins, five Jameses and a Jimmy. After Thomas, Martin, Zachary, Millard, Abraham, Ulysses, Rutherford, Chester, Grover, Benjamin and Theodore. After Woodrow, Warren, Calvin, Herbert, Harry, Dwight, Lyndon, Richard, Gerald, Ronald and Barack.
Finally, Hillary.
And we’re here to see it. Aren’t we lucky?
Many women, marking their ballots for Hillary, cried. Men, too. I did, wearing my mama’s yellow coat so that she could be there with me.
We cried for our mothers or daughters or ourselves, for all the women and girls who have been told, in countless ways, that they couldn’t, shouldn’t, never would.
Hillary Clinton, president of the United States of America.
She did it. We did it. Is it shocking?
Not as shocking as the fact that it’s taken this long.
Not as shocking as it would have been in the early 1800s, when married women didn’t have the right to own property.
Not as shocking as it would have been in 1920, when women finally won the right to vote.
It’s not as shocking as it would have been in 1947, the year Hillary Diane Rodham was born, when many states still refused to let women serve on juries; or as it would have been in 1969, the year she entered law school, when a man could still legally rape his wife.
And still, on this November day in 2016, it shocks. When a barrier explodes, the ground shakes.
We are lucky to be alive to see it, but Hillary Clinton’s victory wasn’t built on luck. It was built on work.
It was built on her work, the decades of being knocked down and getting back up, the months of slogging through this campaign’s long days and insults, many of them sexualized. Doing it in heels. With pneumonia.
More significantly, it was built on the work of the women who cleared Hillary’s road to the top.
An old friend of mine, a minister, has a name for all those people.
“When I cast my ballot today, and marked a woman’s name for president,” she says, “I felt surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, to use a Biblical term. All those women who have gone before us. My mom, your mom, other people’s moms or women who weren’t moms but who, in ways great and intimate, opened doors and blazed trails for us.”
Look around. You can feel the cloud of witnesses. Some are wearing bustles. Some are wearing mini-skirts. Some are wearing pantsuits.
I see my grandmother, who grew up in a south Georgia shack, with an outhouse in the back, and who found a way up and out by going to secretary school and marrying the boss.
I see my mother, who dreamed of being a writer, a pianist or an actress but who raised eight children instead, and who, though she loved her children fiercely, still dreamed those other dreams.
I see Emma, who worked for my Southern grandfather, and who carried the double burden of being black and a woman in a time when both were deemed lesser.
“Can you believe this?” I want to ask them, guessing that they would. They were women of faith, and faith is the belief in things unseen.
At the beginning of Hillary’s campaign, there was a widespread reluctance to talk of the candidate as a woman, of her campaign as historic. Clinton—former U.S. Senator, Secretary of State and First Lady, lifetime champion of women and children—could stand on her own, on gender-neutral ground.
But she is a woman. It is historic. And by the end, the campaign was all about women, thanks largely to her rival, a man who talked about women as anatomical parts, who shamed them for their ugly faces or fat bodies, who, for better and for worse, flushed the presence of the country’s deep misogyny into the open.
“Nasty woman,” he muttered to Clinton during a debate, inadvertently inspiring a rallying cry for her supporters. “Nasty woman” became shorthand for women who, like her, were tough enough to take the insults—fat, shrill, worse—and keep on going.
Clinton’s ability to survive the fight is a potent legacy of this campaign.
They punch you, honey? You stand tall. You’re tired? Push on through. If you need to punch back to stay in the game, you do, then you keep showing that punching alone isn’t enough.
In a recent New York Times poll of teenage girls, nearly a quarter said that Clinton’s candidacy makes them more likely to seek leadership roles. In the same poll, however, almost half the girls said Trump’s comments about women have negatively affected the way they think about their bodies. That’s the dark side of this campaign’s legacy, a reminder that in every age, the forces leading women forward collide with the ones pushing them back.
But today isn’t the day to revisit all the ugliness of the campaign.
Today is a day to appreciate.
We—those of us who wanted this moment—get to cheer a woman whose struggles for respect reflect our own, whose success we helped to make. We get to enjoy the idea that, at last, we have a president who understands from the inside out—from her life lived—what women mean when they talk of respect and equality.
Not so long ago, we were still debating whether the country was “ready” for a female president. Well, she’s here. She’s not the woman some voters, male and female, would have chosen to break the barrier, but she’s the one who did. She will be an imperfect president. All presidents are.
Her status as a woman, the thing we celebrate today, risks dividing the country even more. One of her biggest challenges will be to figure out how to tame that trouble, how to execute one of any president’s chief jobs, which is to set the right tone for the nation.
But before tomorrow and its troubles press in, we can continue to savor this day, so long in coming, and pay homage to our cloud of witnesses.
To the suffragettes who went to prison in their quest for women’s voting rights. The women who endured harassment as the first female on the police force, the construction site, the town council. The women who marched in the streets for equal pay, child care, the freedom to control and protect their bodies, our bodies.
To the girls who ran for class president when girls weren’t supposed to aspire to more than secretary. The girls who insisted that they, too, had the right to play sports. The girls who believed they could be more than their parents imagined they could.
I’d wave into the cloud to Miss Birch, my white-haired sixth-grade teacher, who told me I could be a writer.
I’d say “Formidable!” to Virginia Crosby, my college French professor and guide, who died this summer at the age of 98, just a few months before this election that would have thrilled her.
In my cloud of witnesses, I see men too, the ones who always knew women were their equals and whose belief buoyed me and others.
I see my dad, who didn’t recognize all women as equal but who let me know he believed it of his daughter.
What would the world be like now if women had always been treated as equals? We’ll never know.
But the girls and boys who grow up today, with a clearer vision of what women can be, can show us.
We will be their witnesses.
—30—
mschmich@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @MarySchmich