Day: November 20, 2020

A long time ago Trevor Noah compared Trump to an African Dictator. It was a funny but chilling comparison that seems more accurate by the day. Trump did an excellent job casting doubt on the election before it even happened. He spent years promising that, ‘if he lost’ it would be the result of corruption and tampering by ‘the dems’. He created a narrative that practically guaranteed the situation we are in now: That his losing would be invalid. This set us up for what is about to happen. Trump is about to try an end around on this election.

The signs are there and are extremely worrisome. He considered bombing Iran, which would have led to a war and thus made him a wartime president, which I believe he thinks is enough to stop the transition. He is personally calling electoral boards in states he lost in order to strongarm them to send their electors to vote for him anyway or to change the results. He is acting a public fool. He is being a dangerous and destructive president.

The bottom line is this: Trump is not capable of processing loss. As a result he is willing to scorch the earth to make sure the loss is negated. He is willing to cause tremendous damage to the US and our world standing and our institutional integrity in order to feel like a winner and to be in charge. He already cast doubt on the election process itself to the point where multiple future elections will live under this cloud. He has not considered the consequences of stealing back this election–especially under the flailing circumstances it is being done. Had he started that war, it would have triggered a cascade of events that feel more like the promised events attributed to Obama as the so-called anti-christ.

The Republican machine exists to further the interests of the largest donors, and those people know they can manipulate Trump to get their own policies rammed through. So, the machine keeps working in his favor. However, he is a dangerous and foolish despot that is going to destroy our country if given the chance to stay in power.

A few months ago I was fired from my job. This was a side job–one that I enjoyed parts of but despised the culture and paperwork. Thinking about that today had me grateful for my real job as a tenured professor. This is a job I realize they wanted me to give up to work for them, and thankfully I did not. Job security matters. It means that you can take chances and learn and make mistakes and grow. As a faculty member I’ve done and continue to do all of those things with the knowledge that a mistake is not going to end my career. If I try out new content and students are just meh about it, I am not going to lose my job.

For others tenure might mean that it is time to stop working altogether. I’ve gone through moments of that myself. I went a solid semester where I was thinking ‘how little can I do?’ and then I realized that it is not who I am as a person. So, I did more. I poured more into the classroom experience. I am the instructor I am today because I realize that I want to be there doing what I am doing.

I will never forget the video conference where I was fired. I will never forget how those two under-qualified individuals smiled at me and gleefully told me I was done working with them. I will never forget how the actual talent of the place–the writers who matter most to the clients–rallied to me and told me they still wanted to roll with me. That showed me that I was doing the right thing. The firing showed me that taking chances doesn’t work in corporate life and neither does growth.

You go along to get along. You keep your head down and you let the boss pretend to be a God. At some point in the near future that experience will translate into my writing. I look forward to writing about it in a fictionalized world. However, in the real world I look forward to continuing to focus on growing and getting better in a safe environment where the wolves are not at your back.