Before anyone was facebooking, I had this blog. Writing here, sharing the ordinary happenings of life, "little excitements," was my entrance to social media, and I still get a kick out of the onesy-twosy visitors who drop in every week and being able to track where in the world my visitors are and reading old posts about kayak trips and birds and snowfall and dogs. I've intentionally written more during the COVID19 pandemic, whether anyone's reading or not, because this is a meaningful and significant time and one of these days, my blog posts will provide a unique perspective. March already seems so very far away. My April pickles were so enthusiastic.
The election is dragging out, and while most of us are quite convinced that Biden will get the win based on facts and numbers, Trump and his supporters aren't giving up easily and have created threats to vote counting centers in Arizona and elsewhere. Now, there are concerns that his people will take to the streets and create chaos and the violence Trump has told them to expect from Democrats and liberals. Two hours ago, Donald Trump, Jr. urged supporters to start a war over the counting of votes.
One thing is for sure: there are a lot of people, our POTUS among them, who have no idea how any of these processes work, and some of them are going to potentially dangerous extremes, unwilling - possibly unable - to connect in any meaningful way with truth and reality.
At the same time, Trump is suing to both stop and continue vote counts in Pennsylvania.
Our country has fallen far, and I don't know how to feel about it. In 2016, the election of Donald Trump seemed to be a fluke. For four years, I've been in the mindset of one recovering from an accident. Clinton won the popular vote by more than 3 million votes, but electorally and with the influence of foreign powers, Trump happened.
Convincing myself that his presidency didn't happen on purpose was easy, because I wasn't alone. So many of my friends had the same shocked, horrified response. Our Trumper friends had allowed themselves to be tricked into electing an immoral, corrupt con man in their evangelical gullibility and simple-mindedness. We laughed at how muddy they got on their way up to that squishy mound of moral high ground they claimed and cluck-clucked about how blind they were to the abuses of power and the cruelty of policy.
How wrong we were.
