In spite of the post-election despair, I’m looking beyond to three things that may happen in 2021, five years away:

• Political sanity: I hope the U.S. will have survived and learned from the last of its five greatest traumas, in three of which I’ve lived – its shaky beginning, the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, Donald Trump. I hope a sane new president will be helping the U.S. recover.

• The Electoral College scrapped: The essential bedrock of democracy is, or should be, that each of us has an equal voice in making decisions. That a president who did not receive the greatest number of popular votes has just been elected shows we’re not yet a full democracy. The Electoral College is an anachronism that should be scrapped.

• The Second Amendment scrapped: The 18th Amendment, imposing Prohibition, seemed like a good idea, and the 21st Amendment recognized that it was not. It is far past time for the same thing to be done to the ambiguous Second Amendment: repeal by amendment.

The gun homicide rate in the U.S. is more than five times that of any other developed country, and every day nearly a hundred Americans die from gun suicide or gun homicide (“Barrel of deaths,” The Economist, Nov. 5). And we no longer need or want an armed militia, aka “terrorists,” ready to start a lethal revolution against the government.

Richard Dreselly

Topsham

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