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| I wish I knew who to credit! |
This is by far the funniest meme I have seen all week, and certainly reflects how I feel in this moment.
We are a mess.
Half of us clearly don’t care that we have a sociopath at the helm of a broken, divided, racist country, and apparently want this. The other half has taken to spitting in the wind, crossing fingers, muttering prayers, clicking heels and knocking on wood in the hopes to eke out the slimmest of margins.
Remember I said I felt calm? And that I had stopped furiously looking at polls? HA. Now I am obsessively checking electoral vote maps to see if anything has changed from a minute ago.
I am a mess.
When I was in school, mathematics and statistical probability were not my strong suit. So you can imagine the intellectual gymnastics I’ve been doing with the results that are coming in like freaking molasses in a January deep freeze. And the handily-reelected Mitch McConnell has many folks vomiting in their mouths a bit. Why can’t that evil-incarnate zombie disappear? Now we have the Georgia senate run-offs to freak out about – it’s just one anxiety-producing event after another – so maybe we can have a stand-off in the Senate. The entire country’s cortisol levels are way up – we all need some serious yoga and meditation interventions.
Listen, no matter how this shakes out, we are a broken and divided nation. The stories we all told ourselves about America’s greatness and its people’s inherent goodness, we’ve come to understand, just aren’t true. All of our basest tendencies were given agency over the last 12 years – and really came front and center these last 4. This president and his administration are not to blame for this, they have simply expressed it, embodied it, enabled it and celebrated it. I’m not sure where our better angels are, but they sure don’t live here. As anyone who was ever marginalized knows, the systems in place in this “great nation” have rendered marginalization impossible to fully overcome.
Maybe the mess is the starting point for a path forward?
It will take a long time for us to recover from this national meltdown. At least half of us are interested in making life better for people of color, women, LGBTQ+, the poor. It’s a shame that the other half are more interested in maintaining inequality and making life more difficult for people who are not like them.
We can only hope that change is in the air, and we can transform this mess into something productive.