Open letter to my "grand" girls #7

Playing the game....

Dear Emma, Morgan, Tegan and Ellie,

I was in Baltimore this weekend with you Bradley girls' father and Ellie McCarthy's uncle Josh. We had several long discussions about the subject of all these letters--how to live in "Trump World" as liberal, progressive, proto-socialists.

My son and I have often, often disagreed but on this Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, I found him insightful and well worth pondering.

MLK and 'the Donald'--no more striking contrast in two men could be drawn. And yet, King's national holiday and Donald's inauguration are separated by less than a hundred hours.

What your dad/uncle and my son showed me was this: we are beginning a four year 'game'. And we need to learn how to play it. In spite of what all the TV talking heads and pundits are begging for, Trump isn't going to change. We have 4 years of tweets to deal with. We have irrationality to deal with. We have 'no clear policy' to deal with. It won't be 'politics as usual', it will be a grand 'game' that we must learn to play.

Logic, rationality and politics are out the window. We on the Left know how to do that. What we're being invited into is a vast game that requires us to forget what we know about how to 'do politics' and to live and be and do in an alternative universe not of our making.

Direct attacks may not be the way to go. Subtlety and spinning irrationality may be the way to play the game.

When to make him react and when to merely act around him--that will be the decisions we have to make. Manipulating the Grand Manipulator is the way to go forward.

I'm not sure what all that means yet and hope I'll learn the game as I play it. But I no longer feel depressed and out of control. Suddenly Josh gave me an option. There's a new game in town and we have to learn to play it....

I'll let you girls know how it's going....

Love you so, Granpa.....