Photo courtesy of Ardmore Shutterbug on location in Ardmore at the protest.
This is a protest that was orchestrated by a Bryn Mawr College student who I am told hails from Indiana.
I do not care what side. What do people get from disrupting lives and affecting traffic and putting their own lives at risk for less than legitimate or well thought out reasons? Does all that enact change? And what has LMPD (Lower Merion Police Department) done exactly to deserve this at this time?
Fomenting HATE on any side of an issue does NOT enact positive change and I am sorry but I think it is total and utter bulltwinkies to say:
“The LMPD is our enemy…The people of Montgomery County are too comfortable. Folks on the Main Line aren’t forced to see protests in the city.”
There is nothing truly peaceful about the intent that bothers me. This summer there was a PEACEFUL march organized by a young lady with a lot more style. This is not peaceful.
What these over-indulged privileged college students at elite private (and very liberal) colleges ON THE MAIN LINE will be doing in actuality is scaring the crap out of residents and ordinary working people who have nothing to do with any of this. And given the time of day, people traveling on Lancaster Avenue who work shift work will have a hard time getting to their minimum wage jobs that the architects of this march know nothing about.
I am all for being the change you seek. But not with inflammatory rhetoric like this. That is morally and ethically reprehensible. Hate begets hate.
Again as per the screenshot the organizer is a Bryn Mawr College student. A white middle class college student from the Midwest, and what does she know in her limited life experience from strife?
And why did this Megan Murray organize this? Did she experience any issues with the police department where I used to call home and where West Chester’s former Borough Manager Ernie McNeely is not the Township Manager? My research and the research of others indicates no, so is this like “Oh it’s Wednesday, I think I will wash my hair, eat pizza for lunch, and protest before dinner to burn off calories”?
It’s ludicrous, and I do not respect this. This is like a recreational protest, or they had nothing to do. Hate begets hate.
If these spoiled, predominantly white college students think it is a hardship to go to elite private liberal colleges on the Main Line (which is not conservative held at this point and has not for years) let them transfer and go elsewhere.
Protest for the sake of protest is just silly. Those colleges need local police forces and other first responders like EMTs and fire fighters.
And for these colleges to allow their students to make full time residents uncomfortable just because some student decided that “Folks on the Main Line aren’t forced to see protests in the city. We will change all that by disrupting their communities…”
W.T.F.????
Do we come to your dorms with bullhorns and protest your existence?
Does this organizer even realize that (a) the top 2% she feels have wronged her live far, far away from the downtown Ardmore business district and the people whose lives they are disrupting are more common folk who do not breath rarefied air and actually WORK for a living? and (b) Even people in the city don’t necessarily see any protests, because why? OH yeah, Philadelphia is a very large major metropolitan city, isn’t it?
People actually protesting Trump or any other political figure I actually get. But picking on a police department where you go to college that has never done anything to you yet you call them all facists I do not get and I do not respect.
Update: Protest planned for Wednesday afternoon in Lower Merion
dear politicians: STOP CALLING
See that telephone number?
1-888-632-6548?
They have tried to call my home 27 yes, TWENTY – SEVEN times today alone!
And that is after that number has been blocked for a while. They call and after one ring my phone delightfully drops blocked calls….yet they keep calling and calling and calling….
As Independents we get ALL the calls from ALL of the candidates. We get all of the emails too.
But the calls? They have reached the point of hysteria. They are endless. They start early in the morning and go way too far into the evening.
STOP!!!!! Cell phones, home phones, all phones.
It’s invasive, intrusive, irritating. It’s harassment.
It makes you NOT want to vote, truthfully.
When I started this post, my count was 24 times today for this one robo call. It went up by three as I was writing the post.
This election has turned this country into a seething caldron of vitriol and robo- calls. I for one hate it.
Come Election Day anyone who tries to shove anything at me will have a rude awakening. I am done. I am tired of being polite to the invasion of the political body snatchers.
election overload
I love the one stop shopping on King Road: Test Prep, homemade political vitriol, and the campaign sign of a Democrat whose financial habits apparently rival Trump’s .
I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to see one more sign from any candidate!
I don’t want one more Robo call!
Before I went out this morning to a doctor’s appointment there were four in a row both parties. My favorite of that bunch was the heavy breather from the National Rifle Association.
Then when I came home after my doctor’s appointment I had missed five more Robo calls from imaginary made up numbers. One left a message wanting to speak to the man of the house that was the Republican National Committee. I’m sorry GOP but this little woman erased your message. (I figured since I wasn’t supposed to worry my pretty little head about it it was OK)
I can’t even listen to the radio because today one of Katie McGinty’s big donors must be paying for a lot of airtime. So today I get to hear how she was conceived of immaculate conception and her mother is the Virgin Mary.
I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version of what the truth is on Katie McGinty: she’s one of Fast Eddie’s girls from way back and she’s a political opportunist. So she might’ve been raised on wholesome family values, but Saint she ain’t. Much like Josh Shapiro, she hopes to ride Hillary Clinton’s pantsuit.
Every time I turn on the TV, Donald Trump has one of his children from one of his wives making a campaign stop somewhere. Then there was the whole visual of him in a Wawa buying tastykakes.
Every time I turn on the TV there are any number of attack ads from any number of candidates in three states.
I open my mailbox and it’s full glossy flyers I can’t return to sender. Both parties. Every day.
I am suffering from election sensory overload .
At this point for the first time in my life during a presidential election, I feel like crawling into bed and pulling the quilt over my head until election day is over.
All the freaking money these people are spending attacking each other could be put to better use. They might actually be able to help people in need.
ah yes…the election
Poor squirrel is utterly worn out from the 2016 election season….
I have avoided writing about this U.S. Presidential Election. I have mostly avoided speaking about it on my personal Facebook page except to share the Saturday Night Live debate spoofs.
Why them? Because Saturday Night Live is disturbingly spot on and it is one of the few things that makes me laugh at the hot mess this country has dissolved into.
This past May after the primary, I did something I thought I would never do: I switched my political party affiliation to Independent. I could not take it anymore. I was until that point a life-long Republican, even if I had split my ticket a lot of the time.
Why?
Simple.
As of this past spring, I was no longer in either major party category given the polarization of American politics and the extremes on extremes we have been seeing.
This 2016 election season is the ugliest certainly in my lifetime. People are vile and hateful. All we see are the politics of ignorance. And anger.
2016 has also been the year of ugly violent protests where people are getting hurt…and dying.
What does all the ugliness accomplish?
Let’s go local.
I am in particular really tired of Jack London bodybuilding campaign mailers. Ok so Senator Dinniman? You are or should be a better human being than that. If that is the best you’ve got to put on a double sided post card, save the postage and printing charges. They are stupid and wasteful.
And Duane Milne? Tell the truth and shame the devil? On the 8th day apparently you personally invented Chester County (and everything in it), and several election cycles later, State Representative Milne I am still trying to figure out what you do besides show up for photo ops, so maybe we all should just give the other guy a shot?
So that is it on specific mailings. I am not even going to bother to dissect the Clinton and Trump mailers because they are ALL awful.
Kudos to Congressman Ryan Costello for having the least offensive mailers of a national candidate. It makes it easy to choose you. You get it.
As a registered Independent I officially get EVERYTHING. Every nasty piece of glossy tree killing junk mail that the United States Postal Service will not let me return to sender (I have tried). So I get to pay to recycle mail I did not ask for.
And not only am I getting my political junk mail but the political junk mail of a dead woman, the lady who used to live in our home. Apparently politicians do see dead people.
Now let’s talk about the calls. Robo calls galore. And not so robo calls from the terminally bored reading off scripts usually in an up-talk sing-song tone. The live people are so much fun….tell them you are an anarchist. Go ahead. It’s funny because every single one of them will stop dead and say “What? What’s an anarchist? This call isn’t about religion.” (Then I hang up.)
Social media. Some people should just stay OFF of social media until after the election.
Why?
Because the proverbial villages are being overrun by rabid ridiculousness. If half of the people even understood what the heck they were posting about it would be good. But most do not. And they spout and share angry vitriol from both sides that does nothing except foment hate.
And the political hypocrites. Do not even get me started on them.
I am just tired of this election season. We are a country of Ugly Americans because of the insane polarity and divisiveness. Friends are attacking friends over political talking heads that basically at the end of the day regardless of the party do NOT give a damn about any of us. The game is about the vote, a giant game of whomever gets all the toys wins.
After election day, will they know Jane and John and Sam and Cindy who shook the candidates’ hands at rallies?
NOPE.
This country is a hot angry mess. The election has been whittled down to choosing the lesser of two evils and how is that even a choice? After November 9th will berating your friends and strangers over their choices have been worth it?
And the sign stealers. Grow up. You don’t have to like your neighbor’s sign, they don’t have to like yours. But at this point between the stealing and the corners everywhere that just have too many signs and the highways which will wear political signs for months after the election because no one took them down, I wish there were NO POLITICAL SIGNS. OR ADS. OR BILLBOARDS.
When it comes to politics, I know we will never all get along, but we have collectively lost the ability for civil discourse. And so have the national campaigns.
To quote the Washington Post from this July:
With about 6 in 10 Americans disliking each of them — and as many as one-quarter saying they dislike both of them — the 2016 campaign will almost undoubtedly be a race to the bottom. In such a situation, campaigns will almost always focus on making the case that their opponent is unacceptable rather than making a positive case for their candidate. And that was certainly the case in Clinton’s and Trump’s acceptance speeches.
It’s become cliche to decry each election as the most negative of our lives; the atmospherics of this race, though, are completely unique in recent American history — and uniquely conducive to negativity.
Polling shows voters indeed are already more prepared to vote against something than for something in 2016…
If you have a brain and aren’t afraid to use it, no matter who it is you will vote for on November 8th, you should be terrified. We are a country of haters and some days it feels like we are on the brink of yet another Civil War, and we all know how well that worked out the last time.
Please, for the love of what Americans used to be, do your part to dial back the vitriol and rhetoric. Remember the people who died to give us our freedoms, and try to respect them. I do not think election season 2016 is what they fought and died for. I rather think they were trying to escape hateful behavior like we are seeing from coast to coast.