Letters: America, don't give up - fight back

to suggest to the American people that it was time for us all to come together to solve our common problems. Sorry, Donald, but your problems are not our problems.

This is the time for true Americans to speak out and act. The people coming into power are counting on you to lie down so that they can step over or on you. It is a time to stand in front of them, arm in arm, and make a chain so long that they give up trying to walk around it.

Many of you feel defeated. Your will is crushed. But you won't be able to survive the next four years locked in the bedroom, binge-watching The West Wing.

Don't write your local politicians once, write them every week, because you will have something to write about every week. Have their numbers on speed dial.

The protest can be as subtle as a bumper sticker or as loud as participating in the Women's March on Washington in January. More important, let everyone know how you feel.

When people think they have no power, they lose their power. Every American can effect change.

|Michael Duffy, Bryn Mawr

morning after the 2016 presidential election, Quaker school students and educators across the country engaged in a practice used regularly in our schools: the weekly gathering in silence for reflection, deep listening, and the respectful expression to one another across our differences.

William Penn founded the first Quaker school in 1689, to prepare students from all walks of life, genders, religions, and ethnicities to be moral leaders no matter what profession or trade they might pursue. Penn's school created a program of study through which these young people might together imagine a more ideal society.

Now, we find ourselves in a time of uncertainty and deep distrust. In Quaker schools, communities are turning to the values of peace, integrity, equality, and community, as well as the longtime practices of peaceful conflict resolution and nonviolence, to navigate these turbulent waters.

It is our sincere hope that children everywhere may come together, with respect for all, to find a way to listen deeply to one another, to value the gifts that all students bring to school every day, that they might, together, imagine an ideal society.

|Drew Smith, executive director, Friends Council on Education, National Association of Quaker Schools, Philadelphia, info@friendscouncil.org

dissecting voters' preferences for the two main presidential contenders. They seem to believe that those who did not go to college are dummies - and voted for Trump. This kind of elitist snobbery is one of the reasons the Democratic Party lost the election.

Some of the brightest people I know never went to college. Some of America's great companies were started by people who never went to college. We need to stop categorizing people, which was shamefully done by both candidates, and demeaning the skilled men and women who make this economy work.

Back in the day, many parents could not afford to send their children to college (and some still cannot). When a family had a son and a daughter and could afford to send only one child, usually it was the son who went off to college. Thankfully, that has changed. Females outnumber males today in many medical and law schools.

If the pollsters (all college grads) are so smart, how did they get this election so wrong?

|Hal Kessler, Elkins Park

Hillary Clinton campaign in West Chester, my husband and I participated in phone banks and neighborhood canvassing. But the names, addresses, and phone numbers on the lists we worked from were of registered Democrats only. The reason was that studies of voting patterns had shown that it was more effective to remind party supporters to vote than it was to try to persuade opposing party supporters to switch.

In the days just before Nov. 8, while distributing Hillary pamphlets to area residents - again, only to Democrats - we found that Donald Trump volunteers were leaving pamphlets at every home, regardless of the occupant's party affiliation.

In the Philadelphia suburbs and likely the entire state, the Trump campaign left no registered voter behind. That same campaign strategy on the part of Democrats might have helped give Pennsylvania's 20 Electoral College votes to Clinton.

|Carol Franco, West Chester

"The Second Coming" in 1919, in the aftermath of World War I and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. It was a dark, apocalyptic time.

With the election of Donald Trump, I cannot help but think of Yeats' lines: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

The poem is equally relevant when I see President Obama and Hillary, and Bill Clinton meekly praise and obsequiously welcome their nemesis as the next president: The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

|Peter P. Barnett, Strafford