Day: November 5, 2024

I keep thinking about how I felt back in ’16. I remember thinking, “WTF?” I remember thinking it was a joke and there was no possible way this dude won. Then I remembered thinking, “of course he did. Nobody likes Clinton.” I remember in 2020 thinking Trump had no shot, despite his 8 years of vitriol about illegal votes. Now it is 2024 and 8 years have become twelve and that idea has sank so deeply into the American consciousness that it cannot be removed. He has grown into a way of life more than a brief and powerful counter-movement. MAGA is code for generations of Americans who believe in a particular style of Republican ideology. It is also bro-code for a generation of men being cast in the ultra-masculine fakeness of Andrew Tate and the thousands of social media goons who want to be him (or idolize him). None of it is healthy. None of it is keeping to the idea of what I want this country to represent.

That’s the whole of it though. What do you want the country to represent?

The president is a figurehead. While there is real power there, a lot of what happens comes from the other assortment of figureheads representative of states. That is what a representative government is, and we are now visibly showing our divisions in what we, as a nation want to represent. It is not a melting pot. It is a partition plate, often laid along state lines and church parking lots.

This vote is, in part, a referendum on those divisions and the idea of what it looks like to move forward or backward along a well trod socio-political timeline. Where we are heading is going to be decided today. I for one stand for moving forward. I don’t want to make America great again because the kind of greatness being offered in that statement is from a world that has moved on. It is time we move on with it.

I don’t have it in me to search through thousands of posts to find what I was feeling the day Trump was elected. If he wins again, I’ll make that post. I can say this: more and more I feel my own mortality and the awesome fragility of this society we’ve created. We say it’s built to last and it has endured in one form or another for thousands of years. Yet our weapons keep getting stronger and we keep cycling through leadership that is becoming more and more unstable, standing on the backs of smaller and smaller ego-driven men who “know” what is best for all of us, even and especially when so many of us disagree.

This is far from a healthy time and we are far from a healthy people. Just today I bought a Covid test only to learn that the thing is more closely designed to allow you to say you don’t have Covid than to prove you don’t. The number of times they tell you to re-test and then see your doc for an actual medical opinion regardless is telling. It is telling me that we aren’t getting better. We getting more refined at covering our ass and maximizing our profits at the expense of others—particularly the disenfranchised, who we use, sell to, and ultimately need.

Tomorrow is a scary time. That it is even a choice for so many Americans speaks to collective amnesia, denial, and the sheer stupid will to say you weren’t ever wrong. So many act like things were better under Trump yet refuse to acknowledge any of the chaos that plagued his administration. What is acknowledged is the failure of those around him and his eminent intelligence and strength fire those poor sods he hired in the first place. Because nothing is ever his fault and he never ever does anything wrong or ever has been wrong about anything.

we want so badly to roll with that idea — that falsely framed ideology of the Alpha male fantasy that we are willing to lie to ourselves to make it happen.

we are all passengers on this social titanic and we are about to crash into a second iceberg. Only this may be the one that finally sinks us. There will be movies to herald that fall. I don’t believe they’ll be love stories.