Coping?

Like many of you out there, I'm trying to cope.

This certainly isn't the first election to have not gone my way, but it is the first one where not going my way has predictably catastrophic consequences and I'm not sure how to deal with it.

My neighbor expected it to go down like this, more or less. She was more cynical than I. Me, I truly thought people were going to repudiate the monstrous cancer on our society that is Trumpism. I mean, how could they not? Especially with the way the guy campaigned in the last month-plus?

And yet.

For the moment I'm still mostly stunned. But there are a plethora of other feelings in there, trying to surmount the stunned numbness. It's hard to catalog them all.

You'd think I'd mostly be angry. Don't get me wrong, I am angry—angry at the corporate media that abdicated its journalistic duty, angry at the candidate himself for his overall awfulness, angry at the Russians for their interference (bomb threats?!), angry at each and every one of the people who voted for this petty wannabe tyrant—but it's not the primary emotion here, and I'm not sure what is.

Sadness is in the mix. Fear, certainly. Helplessness. But also embarrassment.

I'm embarrassed to have not seen it coming. I remember the olden days of 2016, when he-who-shall-not-be-named won the first time, and having conversations with friends about what it would mean. I was 100% certain that he wouldn't last a full term in office (hell, I thought there was a very good chance he wouldn't last a full year), as he was surely going to commit multiple impeachable offenses and he would be removed by Congress. Which he did. And, after too long a period, he was impeached. But what I hadn't counted on was the complete and total slide into corruption of the Republican party.

That was then.

It's been eight years and we've seen the bastard get away with everything. We've seen officials from his party turn against their oaths of office almost to a person. We've seen the cult of personality so envelop tens of millions of Americans as to destroy their ability to think critically.

But I still believed in a majority of the voting public. What a sap I was.

When George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 I took it personally. I had worked for the John Kerry campaign, I knew Kerry was a fantastic potential president, and I knew what a disaster Bush had been. I also knew what dirty tricks and propaganda and outright lies the Bush campaign relied on and resented them no end. (And I still think history will one day reveal that those dirty tricks suppressed may thousands of Democratic votes in order to get Bush over the finish line.) When that election result came in I was furious. Bush had been the worst president in living memory, what the hell, people?

Today is so much worse, and yet I'm not furious, not at the top line. Instead I feel dumb. Foolish, even. I feel that I've allowed my relative privilege in this society to cloud my perceptions.

What the [shudder] president-elect represents is horrifying on more levels than one can easily count, but it's not new, not really. I just visited the site of a World War II internment camp the other day. Jim Crow laws persisted for decades. Misogyny has been ingrained in this culture forever. American society has been this ugly to one degree or another since Day One, but here and now is the first time I have felt—not just intellectually understood, but personally felt—oppressed within my own society. The majority of American voters hate people like me.

I'm not trying to draw equivalencies here, I am fully aware that I'm lower on the scale of hatred than many minority groups and people with more immediately obvious "otherness" about them. But the hatred feels personal for the first time.

Now, many that voted for the monster would tell me otherwise, that they didn't vote for him because they hate people. Some of them might even believe that. Some of them might be right, they could be in the cohort that is so disengaged from the world around them that they voted irresponsibly without knowing a goddamn thing.

But most of them voted for him because they hate. They like the cruelty their guy embodies. They like the bullying, the arrogant simpleton behavior, the basic meanness. The bigotry.

Maybe we need this. I mean, even in the idealized world of Star Trek, humanity had to get worse before it got better. In the series premiere of Strange New Worlds, Captain Pike shows an alien culture how Earth didn't get its shit together until after a catastrophic third World War, the origins of which, it was heavily implied, were traced back to January 6th, 2021 and the ensuing second American civil war. And I can now see how that scenario could come to pass—blue state governors are in a hell of a spot now, it's not difficult to imagine states trying to maintain the rule of law and fealty to the Constitution while Federal forces are arrayed against them. It's not difficult to imagine a violent crisis when the [gag] president-elect refuses to leave when his term is up in defiance of the Constitution. It's not hard to imagine a variety of scenarios that could play out with a fascist in the White House surrounded by enablers on all sides.

The majority of American voters preferred a convicted-felon, adjudicated rapist, fascist-to-the-core white man with the intelligence of a baked potato to a principled black woman with impeccable credentials and brains to shame MENSA. Racism lives. Misogyny lives. Idiocy reigns. Ignorance-as-virtue might as well be the new Republican credo.

And I feel—for now—broken and helpless in the face of a blind hatred I'd allowed myself to not see.