Winston Churchill said in a 1942 speech about the second battle of El Alamein, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
In 1966, the Democratic Party of Maryland nominated for Governor, George P. Mahoney. Mr. Mahoney won the nomination with 30% of the total vote in a field of 8 candidates. Mahoney ran on an anti-integration platform which featured the campaign slogan, “Your home is your castle, protect it.” Mahoney was a proud and vocal segregationist and utterly opposed to the Civil Rights legislation meandering through Congress at the time. The legislation would ultimately become the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited 
discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin and sex. It must be noted that the U. S. Justice Department would later sue real estate developer Donald Trump for violating this law in 1973. Trump later settled out of court.
In 1966, African-Americans, who had been primarily Democratic voters in Maryland since the New Deal, voted overwhelmingly by 70% for the Republican candidate, Spiro Agnew. Agnew would later become Vice-President under Richard Nixon and would later resign after being indicted for corruption while a Maryland county official. I would later ask my mother why she voted for Agnew and she explained her vote by saying, “It’s not hard to recognize evil. But sometimes it’s hard to know the best way to fight it. But the thing is, you must fight it when you find it and Mahoney was evil.”
This past election day, millions voted against what they perceived to be “evil” incarnate. Millions more didn’t vote at all because they thought the “evil” would be defeated by others. It wasn’t and so now they take to the street to protest, but it is too late for that. Mr. Trump will be the next President of the United States even though the voters rejected him by almost a million votes.
The 2016 election and its fight for executive branch leadership is over. But the 2018 fight for legislative branch leadership has just begun and it is still a winnable battle. The many who are unhappy with the recent election results must now work to make sure the 2018 Congressional election results reflects the agenda that the majority of Americans voted for in 2016, but didn’t get in Mr. Trump’s selection.
Hillary Clinton’s loss is not the end of the fight. It just marks the beginning of the next one and in that one, we, as a nation, must make better choices.
