Pretty much everyone I know is heartbroken, disgusted, bewildered and depressed by the election of Donald Trump. I can’t speak for the millions of others who voted for him but I can for myself. The left, in which I was born and raised — and raised my children — has gone off the rails.

I see it practicing everything it accuses the other side of, starting with, euphemistically, “lack of information.” The left, with its obsession with victimization and grievance, has neither perspective of life in America nor appreciation of the social advances America has made over the decades. This is relative to everywhere else on Earth and every moment of history.

Alexis De Tocqueville said, “The greatness of America lies … in her ability to repair her faults.” Part of the woke crowd wants to believe nothing has changed in 160 years. Unfortunately, there are financial and emotional benefits in the victim game.

Placing everyone in boxes based on race, class, gender and sexuality is the very definition of divisiveness, another supposed sin of the right. I despair at the failure of so many to notice the contradiction. No one on the left seemed to have even blinked at Joe Biden openly declaring that the qualifications he sought for a running-mate were based on sex and pigmentation.

We’re dutifully reminded that Trump’s a convicted felon. The left ensured as much. George Will of the Washington Post recently explained the hush-money legal case succinctly: “This was concocted by an elected, flamboyantly anti-Trump Democratic prosecutor in Manhattan, who … transformed a bookkeeping misdemeanor into 34 federal felonies.” Our democracy surely is at stake, but not from the quarters many believe.

The left congratulates itself on being tolerant. And it is — of everyone who follows the orthodoxy. Others need police escorts off college campuses or get shouted down by sanctimonious mobs. Look up Circuit Court Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan’s experience at Stanford Law School. The worlds of education and business pledge and practice fealty to DEI and “antiracism” – an Orwellian term that is the exact opposite of what it pretends to be.

Other woke/leftist gems: The Minneapolis school district approved a plan that in the event of layoffs, white staff would have to go first. The Minneapolis city council worked hard to promote defunding the police, an idiotic response to George Floyd’s death.

Of the Minneapolis riots, Harris gloated that they were not going to stop, “and they should not.” Biden came to the area where George Floyd was killed and knelt in prayer. A worthy gesture, but I don’t think the arsonists and looters took it as much of a rebuke or an entreaty to stop rioting.

The legacy media obsessively scrutinizes Trump while fan-worshiping the likes of Kamala Harris. They call rioters in Minneapolis “mostly peaceful protestors” while rioters at the Capitol are called a threat to our democracy. I get that Trump does more than his share of non-presidential stuff and it needs to be reported. And is it ever. He once said that he was the best thing to ever happen to the media and I imagine the media agree.

Is Trump as contemptible as so many believe? This much is clear: If he turned our country into a utopia it would change nothing about the degree to which he is despised. He devoted massive resources to the development of a COVID vaccine but is depicted as an anti-vaxxer. He repeatedly speaks of disengaging the U.S. from war, an idea you would think appealed to the flower-power legatees.

I sure didn’t ask to have two crummy choices for president. I just disagree with most of my peers that one was clearly better than the other.

It’s intimidating to attempt to discuss my observations with friends or family. I know, because I was once the same; they’ll immediately assume the worst of me. To the extent I’ve tried it has not been fruitful. They think I’ve been hypnotized and I think they have been. But my disillusionment with the left is due to what’s observable right outside my door.

I believe that leftist excess is why we have someone like Trump in the first place and I’m relieved about the push-back. Whatever his myriad faults, at least he doesn’t seem to hate America. Whatever the left’s endgame is, it’s clearly not unity and harmony.

Mary Riley, Mendota Heights, is a retired school teacher and mental health advocate.

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