Moving to a Blue State

I put in so much time in August/September/October to get people to vote.  Registering people, then driving them to early voting and then doing work on Election Day.  I had no time to do much else.  I was so invested in getting Democrats elected and actually was confident that Hillary would win and the Dems would take back the Senate.  I believed the media when they said that there was no real path for a Donald Trump victory.  I was not worried because I knew that Feingold was going win in Wisconsin and the Dems would take the Pennsylvania Senate race.  I even thought that no one would vote for a crusty cantankerous 80 year old guy in Arizona or a loser who said that he was not going to run in Florida for Senate races.  Anyone in the media who said that Trump had a chance to win, I dismissed as just trying to keep the horse race going so viewers would tune in.  I knew that Ohio was lost in October, but even during Election night I thought they just were stringing us along to keep us tuned in throughout the night.

It was a depressing month of November 2016.  I turned in my resignation to my job on November 9, and am looking for a job in another state.  I am working through a transition to new leadership at my job, but I will be leaving my social justice job.  I cannot go to work everyday without any hope of change in the state of Ohio.  I have waited for two decades for the cavemen to falter and finally admit that you cannot govern on a platform of only lowering taxes.  It turns out that you can run on that as your only policy.  You can in fact fool most of the people most of the time.  You can allow rich people to send the country and the state into recession and not pay at the ballot box for not doing your government oversight job.  You can never take responsibility for slow job growth and stagnant wages as long as you come up with a boogeyman to blame like immigrants or poor people or welfare moms.  It is too much.  I am going to seek employment in a Blue State. It is hard enough living in this state where people are re-elected for doing nothing.  They no longer run on how they solved your problems.  They run on and win on how much they shrunk government and reduced revenue to improve infrastructure.  They trick the voters with claims that they are rooting out "waste, fraud and abuse," but never get around to doing it.  How come no one ever says, "how bad are you at investigating WF &A that you have spent 20 years talking about it and still have not rooted it out of our system."

It would be one thing if I saw the possibility of hope at the national level I could get up in the morning and do my job.  With a Republican Congress and an extreme administration, it is going to be bumpy road.  I need to go somewhere that people care and want to solve problems.  Ohioans do not care about poor people and we collectively are too stupid to see that they are being led by incompetents.  Good luck.  I love Ohio, but I can't take seeing it destroyed through self mutilation.

By Max Johnson