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I'm a lot calmer today than I expected to be were this the result of the election.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not
great. But, the shock and despair I experienced with the election of 2016 is not quite there. We've been here before already, and there's something to be said for, you know, "the devil you know." Mind you, I fully expect the next four years to be
way worse than the years from 2016 to 2020 were. But I also have a bit of a nihilist streak in me, and I always thought that in the end we're fucked either way. A second President Fuckwit term is going to hasten the process, but, whatever.
Strangely, I had a far better night's sleep last night than I did the night before. At least now we actually know the results. I spent too much time reading social media posts of people predicting a big Kamala Harris win, giving fairly reasoned arguments for it, and I was far too burned by the 2016 election, still, to lock into their predictions—which, of course, proved to be wrong.
I slept in fits and starts all night Monday night. I was exhausted yesterday. Last night, watching voting returns with Shobhit, the more the night wore on the more there was talk about counties in swing states with smaller margins of victories in urban areas Harris was expected to win and greater gains for President Fuckwit in rural areas he was expected to win. There was hope and expectation much of the evening, for the same "red mirage" that occurred in 2020, which was rapidly dissipating by about 8:00.
I was just so tired. I thought about how we "fell back" last weekend and gained an hour, and the same time last week was actually 9:00. I was like: fuck it. I'm going to bed. I can't take this anymore.
Before that, though, I did have an unusual moment where a strange calm came over me, even in the face of this horrendous result. I figure it must be somethin akin to when someone knows they are about to die, and a calm washes over them. And there was even a point at which, in my head, I recited the Serenity Prayer to myself:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference
Could this mean I actually
prayed last night? (If Mom were alive, she'd be delighted.) I would argue: no, not really. This has no bearing on my atheism, and you could just as well simply remove "God" from the recitation. It is merely a useful reminder of accepting what you have no control over.
Somehow, I'm doing even better than I was the night of the 2020 election, when I went to bed convinced President Fuckwit had been re-elected (just as I did last night), only to wake up the next morning to the stunning revelation that it wasn't over yet. Mind you, I also had phone conversations with Gabriel in 2020 about how it wasn't over yet, and that Biden was likely to win. Gabriel had no such confidence during our phone conversation Monday night, when he literally said, "Trump is probably going to win."
I kept holding onto hope that we would win this year the same way we did in 2020—talking heads last night talked about how the Harris campaign had that same expectation. I woke up around 1 a.m., though, and I couldn't help but to check my phone. Trump was called for Pennsylvania. The election overall had not yet been called, but he was ahead in both Michigan and Wisconsin. I abandoned all hope at that point, or what little hope I still had left. It took about an hour but I finally fell asleep again. When I woke up at 5:15 this morning and immediately checked the
Washington Post, the headline was,
Trump Triumphs.
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There are so many things I keep thinking about, so many horrors promised by a new term with President Fuckwit. Likely an unprecedented and horribly inhumane deportation program. Russia all but guaranteed now to prevail in its war against Ukraine. A Supreme Court moving even further to the right, locked in thus for possibly the rest of my life. An influx of wild incompetence at every level of government, and draconian measures brought in by the Republicans' Project 2025 playbook. Certainly an even greater move toward open racism and xenophobia, hate crime and violence than we even had during his first term.
The biggest thing I can't get over, really, is how the country made the wild choice to elect him to begin with, then rejected him in the next election as though realizing it had been a mistake—only to elect him
again four years after that. I'm not really buying into the ideas of election interference here. Republicans are unfair in their practices and they cheat, for sure. But this is too grand a scale, and polling beforeheand reflected these results: a solid half of the American electorate really believes that what matters most is party loyalty, no matter how big a monster the person leading it is. Plenty of people who voted for him don't actually like him (to be fair, a stunning majority of them actually do), but only care that the Republican Party is running the government.
When Biden won in 2020, I posted a photo of fire seen in a rear-view mirror. That takes on pretty awful meaning now: the country turned that car right around, and is gleefully driving it right back into that fire, one raging even bigger than before. On the morning of Election Day in 2016, I posted a photo of a glass ceiling shattering, so convinced was I that Hillary Clinton would win. A Facebook friend of mine posted photo yesterday morning of a giant "blue wave"—in the form of a huge ocean wave—about to crash onto a silhouette of President Fuckwit. I got a sinking feeling when I saw that, the kind of thing that could age very poorly in only 24 hours. That Facebook friend posted several comments in the thread below the photo, utterly confident of this result. He posted a follow-up this morning about how America is basically over.
I had a very dark thought last night while I was getting ready for bed, which gave me strange comfort.
If things get bad enough, I thought,
I can just end it. Mind you, I would seek asylum in another country before I did anything as drastic as jumping off a bridge. But, let's say the Supreme Court revokes same-sex marriage rights, something that is now very much in the cards: I will feel more personally demoralized by that than anything else the U.S. government has ever done in my lifetime. I honestly don't know how I will go forward in this country if that happens.
Half this country has been duped. They so easily believe things that are provably untrue, it's astonishing. And it's how this election was won. In all likelihood, the last election would have been won the same way if not for the pandemic—something Republican voters conveniently seem to have forgotten. (I should say, in all fairness, my own life was actually worse, on average, from 2020-2021 or so, than it was the previous four years, due to the pandemic alone. But at least we had a President then with genuine humility and compassion, who made choices that were far better for the country going forward. He's also the most legislatively successful president we have had in generations, and I wish people actually understood that.)
So, what now? I think about another thing Gabriel said on Monday night, in the face of a likely President Fuckwit triumph: "I can only pay attention to things that are right in front of my face." We live our lives, we take it day by day, we keep going. I came in to work this morning thinking:
At least I am surrounded by like-minded people here. "Here" could be PCC, it could be Seattle, it could be Washington (well, Western Washington), it could be the West Coast overall. I still cannot deny my privilege, as a White guy—even a queer one—in a deeply liberal region of the country. This would be so much worse for me if I were, let's say, a Black woman enduring an unwanted pregnancy in Florida (where, incidentally, their abortion rights measure, which got 57% approval, failed because of fascist minority-rule policy that blocks passage without meeting a 60% threshold).
I thought of so many despairing things I could have posted to my socials this morning. I thought about how virtually all of my liberal cohorts would be doing that, and I would just be shouting into noise. I thought it was important
to post about results that came out of yesterday's election that were actually good (most notably, seven states, two of them deep red ones, expabding abortion rights). We really need to see some good news right now.
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[posted 12:32 pm]
