"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."
-Hunter S. Thompson, about 44 years too early and 100 million Americans off, from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
I'm not going to pretend to take the high road on this one, dear readers.
To say that a very large portion of my fellow American citizens have made a gigantic mistake - one that will stink to high heaven like a turd dropped unexpectedly by some Baleen whale that's mysteriously learned how to fly for years, if not decades - is an understatement. Well, some of them did. Actually, not even a majority: Hillary Clinton got something like 200,000 more votes but still lost in the Electoral College, which is precisely why that institution is looking more and more archaic and even downright dangerous since it's the second time in five Presidential elections that that's happened.
But even worse is what got elected as a result.
I could've lived with a McCain presidency or a Romney presidency. No, really. I might not have liked it, but neither one of those gentlemen was as much a toxic lump of egomania, misogyny, xenophobia and a whole lot of other various types of rotting garbage as Trump is. In my opinion, he is simply the single worst candidate for President ever put forth by a major party in the last one hundred years and may be one of the worst ever, up to and including Aaron Burr and Ulysses S. Grant. And his supporters are no prize, either. Especially these supporters.
So what do you do when you wake up and find out that someone like this is President-elect?
You could do any number of things, including crawling into a deep depression, planning on immigrating to Canada in as short a span of time as possible, or even - with some of the more despair-racked people, unfortunately - consider suicide. That last choice is an especially horrid one, especially considering the sort of worthless asshole who's inspiring such an act.
Care to guess what my answer is to all of those "solutions" is, though?
Would a sound "Fuck, no" suffice?
If Trump goes out of his way to put forth the worst parts of his nebulous - but still destructive - agenda in motion, the only solution is to fight back. Through peaceful means, of course, but if it turns out that some long, long years down the line we're looking at political mobs hired by President for Life Trump to beat down anyone who dares look at him funny at a public appearance, then some other alternatives that aren't as peaceful might have to occur instead. I don't think it'll ever come to that - the Orange Monstrosity is nothing if not adept at self-destructive outbursts that could even alienate veteran Republicans (as he did with Gordon Humphrey), but this is a very odd world we live in at the moment. It's liable to get even more uncomfortably strange as time goes on.
But I'm only being just a little alarmist about this, right?
...right?
Not alarmist, but realistic.
ReplyDeleteI do note that organizing a beat-down mob requires, well, organization, something not much seen from Team Trump.
I *did* point that he's an idiot.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, he'll be an idiot with his finger near The Button by late January. And that's the level of idiot no one needs.