The day after the election, I couldn’t concentrate. I paced my home, my neighborhood, went to the dentist, missed an important meeting, all because the outcome of our election stunned me. By the next day, however, I started to get angry.

I was a journalist and I have always read the so-called newspapers of record, or as others call them the “lame stream media”. I think I began to understand that perorative name.

Where were the columnists of these newspapers of record? I don’t remember hearing of a rout. I remember being told over and over that the race was skin tight or too close to call. Oh yes, by the day after they started apologizing for what they missed, telling us all how sorry they were. And that infuriated me.

I do understand that starting with Clinton, the democratic party abandoned the working class. Both parties did I believe. They hoped that international trade and a college education would remedy the problem, forgetting that a working stiff who used to have a job that earned respect and enough money to marry and raise a family must now struggle to adapt to this new, “preferred” new, order.

How could they and we not understand that even though our economy grew and is still, post pandemic, the envy of the world, it did not help working people much at all? The wealth and income gap had become too wide and deep. For heaven sakes, even the college educated have needed two incomes to afford to provide for their families.

I know I am from another era. For years now I have mourned the lack of civility in political speak of late, personified by our next President. Perhaps we are all to blame for Trump’s resurgence, living on an Island where high grocery prices and the cost of electricity seem baked in to our reality. I should have known that my relative ease paying these costs sets me apart from so many. I should have known by the growth of customers at food banks. I should have known by the increase in homelessness. I should have tried harder to understand the anger at Trump rallies. Like so many of us, I saw it but didn’t see it.

But as I look back, it is staring me right in the face. My father was a doctor, my mother a former teacher of elocution, until she married and had nine children. My father paid for all of us to go to Catholic schools and colleges. That absolutely could not happen today.  It would be impossible to afford.

And we all benefitted. We all got good jobs, could buy a home, maybe even a vacation home too. That also seems impossible to have happen today for far too many.

So now I find myself hoping that a President I am sorry to say I have no respect for can actually help those who voted for him; can actually deliver more than vengeance and maybe even “fix” the economy that has betrayed them. But then, that would stun me too.

But I would be happy to pace my home and neighborhood again if I am wrong.

Paula Lyons lives in Vineyard Haven.