Nostradamus I’m not

Well, that wasn’t the election I was hoping for.

The voters of America, in their infinite wisdom, returned to the Presidency a convicted felon, sexual predator, and self-confessed wannabe dictator.

In the days leading up to Tuesday, I was convinced that Kamala Harris, with her joyful optimism, would overcome the darkness and fear of Donald Trump’s campaign. Boy, was I wrong. But I know one thing for sure: you won’t see Harris supporters trashing the Capitol and threatening to kill the Speaker of the House.

I’ll leave it to the experts to determine what happened. I have my ideas but they’re probably as unreliable as my prognostications.

Now some of you dear readers may be thinking, “Oh Cullen, quit your whining. Trump won’t be so bad. He was just kidding on a lot of what he said about killing journalists.” That may be true, but when his own vice president, Mike Pence, his own chief of staff, General John Kelly, and most of his former cabinet said Trump was a psycho, I tend to believe they know what they’re talking about.

Our parents raised us to tell the truth and pay our bills. What a quaint idea, apparently out of style nowadays with our president.

I’m afraid that Trump’s agenda, if he carries it out as promised, will have catastrophic consequences for our little burg of Storm Lake, not to mention the rest of the nation and the world. We’ll have to wait and see. But getting rid of millions of immigrants won’t be good for the packing plant industry that our community has worked so hard to accommodate over the past four decades. We could see half our population vanish overnight, leaving the rest of us to pay for the schools and water system built to accommodate an important meatpacking economy that no longer can operate.

I’d like to see less government interference in our private lives, which apparently motivated many Trump supporters, but the voters must be OK with Uncle Sam and Aunt Kim peeking into our homes and watching our every move. My hope is that government would concentrate first on more basic tasks, like paving roads and making sure we have clean water to drink.

Maybe all my dire fears won’t come true, and the U.S. economy — which is already the strongest in the world — will get even better. Donald Trump promises he will lower the price of groceries. I look forward to paying 99 cents again for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk. It may be a little tight for our farmers at first, losing two of our biggest trading partners — Mexico and China — because of tariffs we impose on them. But we’ll figure it out.

I’ve always been an optimist, and I’ll hope for the best. But as they say when you fly the friendly skies, “Fasten your seatbelts. We could be in for some turbulence.”