Something unexpected happened last week - no not that

Former T-U editor sums up presidential election perfectly - selfishness

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Something quite unexpected happened this week.

No, besides that.

Those still bereft from the results of Tuesday's election seemed to rally. What started as group therapy about the future of the country and the world, gradually began to evolve into something else.

Most weeks, I write three columns for The Front Page.

But when things are troubling me, I seek refuge in the writing, in the words.

So I wrote a bonus column on Tuesday.

And found myself at the keyboard in the early hours of Wednesday trying to understand America.

For 24 hours, I stopped reading the news and left the television off.

A lunch with two colleagues was group therapy as well.

By Friday, I was writing about how essential freedom of the press has been to our country, to our democracy.

And kept right on writing.

Proclaiming that Will and I had been writing not only to make our voices heard, but to allow a forum for others to be heard as well.

That's when I saw it happen.

The number of comments had been rising all week. So many others seemed to be searching for answers as well.

When I wrote about my concerns for freedom of the press on Friday, there were 91 more comments from readers who agreed it was essential and had to be protected, despite a recent Gallup poll that said 7 in 10 Americans did not "trust" the media.

Most weeks I write three columns.

This past week I wrote six.

There was work to be done. So many things that needed to be said.

When I wrote about my lunch on Saturday and explained why Will Doolittle and me were spending our retirement much like we had spent our years at the newspaper, people responded.

The comments came one after another.

So did new subscriptions and over a two-day period we had more people get a paid subscription than at any previous time since February.

There was a swagger to those comments.

There was pushback.

One person said they were subscribing to "join the resistance."

When I showed up to play basketball on Friday, one of the players said to me, "Well, the sun came up Wednesday morning" as a way to downplay the concerns.

"Wednesday isn't what I am worried about," I said.

It's January 20 and the first 100 days that have me concerned.

Just because the losing candidate conceded and the current president invited the winner to the Oval Office doesn't mean the country has returned to normal.

We are not out of the woods yet.

We know that tariffs could wreck the economy and make inflation worse.

We know that climate is not going to be addressed at a a time when it MUST be addressed.

We know that Ukraine could be abandoned and the NATO alliance gutted.

And the Justice Department might be used for revenge.

All those things were weighing on our readers.

And maybe a few of us might end up on a list while I wondered what happened to the Democrats grand plans to steal the election?

The worry, the angst was still there these past few days, but I saw Americans standing up and saying they would fight to preserve democracy.

They are looking for hope.

We all are.

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We are selfish

Rex Smith, the retired long-time editor of the Times Union, has also been writing a Substack newsletter in retirement called The Upstate American.

This has been a week where so many concerned voters are looking for commentators like Rex to offer up their perspective about the future of the counry.

I think Rex got it just about right:

"We are mourning the loss of America’s identity, and we have doubts about its soul.

"The impending return of Donald Trump to the White House suggests that America is not what many of us have thought — or, at least, it isn’t that right now. We are not a land of hope where neighbors take care of neighbors, or where everybody, regardless of race or ethnic origin or beliefs gets an equal shot at achieving their dreams. We aren’t a beacon of democracy and freedom for the rest of the world, a defense against totalitarianism and injustice, and we’re not a place where voters listen to reasoned debate and thoughtfully choose our future course.

"This is apparently a nation fueled by grievance and selfishness, entertained by cruelty and hatred, readily accommodating of gross amorality in its leaders. We’d rather have our biases confirmed than our horizons expanded, our myths sustained than our flaws conceded and rectified. We care about ourselves, mostly."

Bravo Rex for getting it perfectly right.

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Autocracy teed up

Ben Rhodes is the former deputy national security advisor under President Barack Obama. In an commentary in the New York Times this week, he explained how we got where we are and how we might get out of it.

"The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts. Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.

"Donald Trump has won the presidency, but I don’t believe he will deliver on his promises. Like other self-interested autocrats, his remedies are designed to exploit problems instead of solving them, and he’s surrounded by oligarchs who want to loot the system instead of reforming it. Mass deportation and tariffs are recipes for inflation. Tax cuts and deregulation will exacerbate inequality. America First impulses will fuel global conflict, technological disruption and climate conflagration. Mr. Trump is the new establishment in this country and globally, and we should emphasize that instead of painting him as an outlier or interloper."

Trump is now the establishment and when his policies cause hardship, the voters will do what they always do - look elsewhere during the next election.

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The evil Feds

What makes the federal government so frustrating to so many politicians is its complexity.

Over many decades, the bureaucracy has become bloated and more expensive, but it does serve important functions that would wreck our country if it was dismantled.

Imagine the ramifications if that infrastructure was gutted.

There are people who send us our Social Security checks.

There are air traffic controllers who ensure we arrive safely at our vacation destination.

There are consumer protection agencies, health departments and the Environmental Protection Agency to guarantee that we are protected in our daily lives.

Heather Cox Richardson pointed out that the president-elect wants to reinstitute "Schedule F" so he can convert tens of thousands of civil servants to "at-will" employees who could be fired and replaced with political appointees.

“They are what makes this government work,” Natalie Quillian, a deputy chief of staff in the Biden White House, said of the federal work force.

Richardson found that three midlevel E.P.A. officials said they feared that the subject of climate change would be off limits in the new administration as it is in Florida.

And fears that the Education Department will be eliminated and the protections it provides.

The people voted for change.

I'm not sure many realize how much change that might mean.

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Danke Schoen

The New York Giants proved they may be the worst NFL team on two continents with a 20-17 overtime lost to the Carolina Panthers in Munich, Germany Sunday.

The highlight of the game may have been when referee Shawn Hochuli turned on his mike to explain an offsides penalty by saying, "Fehlstart angriff, fünf yards strafe" which translated into "False start offense, five-yard penalty."

There was an immediate reaction from the German crowd. They let out a robust cheer in appreciation of the referee speaking the language of their homeland.

It's not often the referee is cheered.

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Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.