By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Let us be clear headed and focused now on what we must do as a nation.

We have elected a new president and vice president of the United States. Today we witnessed in real time as the Electoral College certified the victory earned by President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Normally, this day would have come and gone and no one would have noticed.

Except that this year, thanks to the shenanigans launched by the man Biden defeated — Donald J. Trump — this constitutional duty came into sharp focus. You know what? That’s a good thing! It is good that Americans who take this process for granted now understand with a good bit more clarity how the framers set up this democratic system of ours.

I detest the shenanigans that Trump has sought to pull off. There has been a significant upside, though, if you consider that Americans are paying a good bit more attention to the democratic process.

Let me be clear on this point, too: The Electoral College actually worked damn well, unlike what happened in 2016 when Trump won the electoral vote majority while losing the actual vote to Hillary Clinton. This year, the president-elect’s Electoral College majority and his actual vote majority seem to mirror each other. I won’t call his victory a “landslide,” even though he rang up the same electoral vote total that Trump did four years ago. His victory, though, is significant.

We watched it play out. We paid attention to it. Under normal conditions, we wouldn’t have celebrated this certification the way many of us are doing. There ain’t anything normal about Donald Trump, which he has demonstrated repeatedly since the moment he became a politician.

So you see? Trump’s antics have produced something constructive: an appreciation of our great democratic process!