‘Stop it,’ bring peace and calm back to citizenry

The local, regional, state and national elections are over. Yet, people are still fighting, protesting, losing friends over it.

In the words of President-elect Donald J. Trump, “STOP IT!”

Now, he said those words to his own supporters, and he meant it for everyone in a Nov. 13 “60 Minutes” interview on CBS.

“I am so saddened to hear that,” Trump told CBS’ Lesley Stahl when she said Latinos and Muslims are facing harassment. “And I say, ‘Stop it.’ If it—if it helps, I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: ‘Stop it.’” Trump then said, “I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, because I’m going to bring this country together.”

Now, I don’t really care whom you voted for or how you feel at this point. What I care about is we have a free country that held free elections, though the system has its flaws, and Trump won that election on Nov. 8. He will become the 45th U.S. president once he is inaugurated Jan. 20, 2017 at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC.

Fighting via words on social media or on the streets is not going to change that. If it should, then the United States of America is no more.

Read that again.

Is that what you want if you are disgruntled at the new president to be? To lose the very essence of what our great nation is about—Freedom?

The same goes for local and regional races. There were a lot of incumbents unseated or nearly unseated and now rumors of plans to unseat those that remained.

Stop it!

Come together as true Americans. Support and respect of the Office of the Presidency, the Office of the Mayor, etc. Get behind your leaders and make sure they do their jobs right. But do so in a respectful, peaceful way.

Perhaps, Thabiti Anyabwile, a black Baptist minister, said it best in a Nov. 9 commentary titled “I’m a black Christian, and guess what? Donald Trump’s America is my America, too”

He wrote: “This is our America. We share this land and participate in this republic; one that the writers of the Pledge of Allegiance hoped would be ‘one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ And there’s the rub. ‘Liberty and justice for all’ has been difficult to gain. And it turns out to be messy and sometimes contradictory business. Some see a Trump presidency as an ‘existential threat’ to liberty and justice in the nest sense of the American promise. I’m among them.

“But we’re not helped if we now shrink away into our enclaves loathing Trump and ‘those people’ who voted for him. We’re only helped if we participate more fully in our government ensuring, as Lemuel Haynes put, liberty is ‘further extended’ rather than contracted…

“The most troubling outcome of this election will not be Trump’s presidency. The most troubling outcome could be our willingness to retreat deeper into self-interested and self-idolizing divisions that pay little attention to our “other” neighbors.

“We have not been a country that has consistently taken “love your neighbor” literally. We’ve been a country of self-justifying Pharisees who retort, “Who is my neighbor?” My friend, every American is your neighbor. We would do well to love them in word and deed.”

So stop the hatred, the discontent, the lying, the ranting, the raging. Become a part of your government, local and otherwise. And, as I’ve said in previous commentaries, attend your local government meetings, look at the records—the records are public—and demand transparency, but respectfully.

Peace America. Peace.

Jan Murray is a staff writer for The Southeast Sun and Daleville Sun-Courier. The opinions of this writer are her own and not the opinion of the paper. She can be reached at (334) 393-2969 or by email at [email protected].