MOURNING in America

“Don’t say a prayer for me now. Save it ’til the morning after.”

These words, from ’80s pop legends Duran Duran, were not written with the presidential election in mind.

Yet here we are.

A week after the vote, for some it’s “morning in America.” For others, “mourning in America.”

Donald Trump is your president-elect.

And for many of you reading this, it is a time for recalibration.

When you’ve invested all your hope into the national Democratic machine, and saw your candidate lose Florida — and lose nationally — bigly, then after a loss, you have to ask what the next move is.

Thinking in terms of national politics will drive you crazy. The GOP will control Congress for at least two years; the White House for four.

Love may have Trumped hate. We may have been stronger together. You may have been With Her.

Yet here’s the problem: Despite all the slogans, despite a machine slicker than a 40-gallon drum of baby shit, despite having the entirety of the 2010 Top 40 chart-toppers as surrogates, it didn’t help.

Jay-Z may rock the Tom Ford and Beyoncé may serve up the lemonade. But in light of decades of corruption and questions — from cattle futures and Whitewater to superpredators and Benghazi, with a few years of blatant influence-peddling via the Clinton Foundation thrown in there — those superstar surrogates may have rocked the mic. But they didn’t rock the crowd, via generating turnout.

I covered an event with African-American Duval Dems and the Rev. Jesse Jackson during the last Saturday of early voting, and noticed an interesting dichotomy when I posed a question about an enthusiasm gap in base turnout.

Jackson tried to tell me, in a tent near the Legends Center in NW Jax, that the base was just as fired up and ready to go for Hillary Clinton as it was for Barack Obama. Yet his spin was belied by one or two Jacksonville locals who shook their heads behind him, before realizing that they were admitting the issue.

As much as Hillary For America attempted to drive base turnout, in state after state they couldn’t match the rural and suburban “unlikely” voters who came out and voted for Trump. The Rust Belt, expected to be a road to victory for Clinton, instead was a noose around her campaign, with Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin going GOP … to the expectation of few pollsters, except for outliers down the stretch.

In any event, Donald Trump and a GOP Congress, together, constitute the new national reality.

And activists in Jacksonville need to refocus their energy, thinking local.

There’s a lot to do here, after all. For example, this year we have already seen zoning fights over microbreweries in Springfield. The beef: They were too close to churches.

Council might have rolled over on that issue were it not for the concerted effort of locals who worked to ensure that it didn’t, packing a Land Use & Zoning meeting that saw the weathervane councilman from Springfield, Reggie Gaffney, going from being an opponent of progress to a supporter.

There are other issues that require citizen input locally, including other zoning matters.

The passage of Amendment 2 — with more than 70 percent support in Duval — means that there is a rousing mandate for medical marijuana in Jacksonville.

However, as someone who follows this council closely, I can tell you that if the glacial rollout of zoning regulations related to Charlotte’s Web are any indication, they will drag out the process for as long as possible, preening and posturing about how cannabis is public enemy No. 1 to our collective moral code.

You can have input on the zoning process. You can make a difference. If you show up at meetings, if you make the case for placement of dispensaries that isn’t driven by fear or the need to placate the two-bit theocrats in town, you can ensure that this medicine is available to people without undue stress that pretends to be motivated by public safety, but in reality is the misbegotten progeny of political cowardice and rank expediency.

As someone who never would have voted for Hillary Clinton under any circumstances, her loss doesn’t move me. But I’ve supported my share of losing candidates and causes that were before her time.

I’ve seen excoriations of people who voted third-party on social media. The implication, as was the case in 2000, was that all third-party voters should have been locked in with the Democrats.

That wasn’t the case in 2000; Nader voters weren’t promised to Al Gore. They were motivated by, among other things, a realization that Gore’s wife first got in public life by putting warning labels on rap records with explicit content. And by the fact that the Clinton Administration’s neo-liberalism was closer to “compassionate conservatism” than it was to the concerns of the Seattle World Trade Organization protesters.

In 2016, a similar reality holds. For many voters, including progressives and libertarians, Hillary Clinton was disqualified. Not because of her gender. But because of her record in public life.

Nothing is guaranteed. Especially not the result of a national election.