NOVEMBER 4, 2020 – Well, as it turns out, I was wrong about a Blue Tsunami. The best half (apparently) of America can hope for is that Biden/Harris squeak through with 270 electoral votes.
Four years ago I wondered how in the world close to half the country could support a person as patently dishonest, divisive, and disgraceful as Donald Trump. Now, after four years of in-your-face dishonesty, divisiveness, and disgrace they voted for him again.
Which leaves me disgusted and disheartened. I live in a country where one out of two people is more concerned about brandishing guns, imposing religious will, assailing public health, deregulating fossil fuel, and thrusting the middle finger at the rest of the world, than about common interests, common decency, and . . . how about this—a common future.
The Middle Finger Party should unwrap themselves from Old Glory and officially adopt their unofficial flag—the coiled snake on a yellow field and the slogan, “Don’t Tread on Me!” To these words they should add, “#MeNow!”
The run-up to the Civil War was so much simpler than our current divide. In the decades prior to the Confederacy, slavery was limited to the South, and Abolitionists were confined to the North. When war broke out, Unionists lived in . . . the Union . . . and rebels lived in the states of . . . the Rebellion. Today, Republicans and Democrats live in every state of the country. A separation of red from blue would be impossible without the bloody disruptions caused by the 1947 partition of India.
Today, 50% of the country is aggrieved that 90% of America didn’t reject Trump after his four years of hell on wheels. Yet, the ugly reality is that in at least three regards—guns, greed, and “God”—America itself is hell on wheels.
Yesterday was a day of reckoning, and the results so far reveal that we have yet to reckon fully with our history and our streak of extreme individualism at the expense, ironically, of our individual welfare. Personally, I’m having to come to grips with the bad end of a national, cultural Faustian paradox: if a society is built around unfettered “freedom and liberty,” that society will eventually lose its freedom and liberty to greed, ignorance, myopia, and religious fanaticism.
I wonder what great thinkers from the past would make of us—from the Spring and Autumn period (China), Periclean Athens, Republican Rome, the Age of Reason, or . . . Philadelphia in the 1770s and 1780s. What would Abraham Lincoln think? Or, dare I ask, Martin Luther King, Jr.?
As we await the outcome of Rumpus vs. Rationality, we who are disheartened must turn to the words of a poet. “In three words,” wrote Robert Frost, “I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
