Bob Charest: ‘Our Political System Has Become a Tragedy’

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By Bob Charest

My greatest hope is that the country doesn’t tear itself apart after the Nov. 8 election. One side is going to be left feeling very angry, probably disenfranchised from the whole system, and I don’t think it is going to be pretty.

At the very least, I think gridlock will occur on a scale we have never seen before. It makes me so sad to see the money that has been spent on these races, money that could have kept a hungry kid from going to bed tonight; to help a family suffering something devastating, like cancer or job loss; or to develop a program to keep young people from overdosing on heroin or fentanyl.

The money that is wasted in this country is phenomenal. Our political system has become a tragedy.

And having said that, I also want to say that I know a lot of people who are voting for Trump. As he has said about walking down Fifth Avenue and shooting somebody, with many of these people, he won’t lose any votes no matter what he says.

They are voting for him because he isn’t one of them, “them” being the do-nothing, gas-bag politicos now in power. I get that. They want to try something else. And when the option is Hillary, someone so battered and suspect, we all have to wonder as Jay Leno said the other night when he visited Jimmy Fallon’s show, “325 million people in this country, and those two are the best we could come up with?”