For many years, we raised our four now-grown children in a Victorian house. The back half of the property had been subdivided for an old woman and her family. She had the same name as my oldest daughter, Sarah, and we became friends. She was curmudgeonly, an underrated quality I admire because it generally requires authenticity.
I learned this great phrase from her—she'd use it whenever she didn’t like someone but was too polite to say it; for example she couldn’t stand the many “lawn decorations” of our next-door neighbor. She’d tsk-tsk and shake her head slightly and say, “Well it just wouldn’t do if we were all alike.” It struck me as sort of a Northern old-lady version of a Southerner’s “bless her heart” where one doesn’t wish for a single heart to be blessed, but would prefer for that heart to be struck down by lightning. Only a woman with the right mix of intelligence, wit and mild condescension can craft words that sound like honey, but drip with poison.
Strong men aren’t threatened by powerful women; those men voted for Kamala Harris. Weak men with mommy and penis-size issues are threatened by women in power. Weak men abuse women to feel powerful. Weak men institute DEI initiatives that include the word “women” in search terms. Weak men pretend they can rename bodies of water to troll women leaders of nations. Weak men confuse the way people act around them because they’re wealthy, with legitimate popularity. Weak men deport and take away the rights of those who don’t look like them because they’re insecure narcissists. Weak men raid an entire government to turn its people against it to protect their own financial interests. Weak men take away the reproductive rights of women because they want to control our bodies and our choices.
Think for a moment about how different our country would be right now if Kamala Harris had been elected. Other nations wouldn’t hate us. We wouldn’t have to wake up in the morning wincing in fear to see terrifying news headlines about which government agencies were dismantled by an unelected madman while we slept. There wouldn’t be daily protests all over the nation at state capitals and federal agencies. Children wouldn’t be dying in other nations while $2 billion worth of American farm crops rot on barges because USAID was shuttered by teenage computer hackers.
Ironically, egg and other prices wouldn’t have skyrocketed due to economic hysteria and uncertainty. MAGA doesn’t admit defeat, they celebrate exposing government overspending, relying on tweets from an oligarch trying to protect his own government contracts while the elected president spends millions of taxpayer dollars attending a Super Bowl where he won’t ever congratulate the winner since it wasn’t his team, taking laps at Daytona, and taking security details away from his enemies. There’s no joy in “I told you so” when your democracy is fucked beyond recognition.
My old lady neighbor died at age 93 before she had to see Trump as president. She lived through 17 presidents. A lifelong librarian and Democrat, in experiencing the world’s division today caused by the current lack of leadership, I wonder if she would’ve simply said, “It just wouldn’t do if we were all alike,” or if she’d have had less subtle words.