At Dawn
A shift back to boring. Hopefully.
You know what I’m most excited about? Not having to write about politics anymore. You could say that was a choice, and sure. But it also wasn’t when seemingly every waking moment of every waking day of every waking week of every waking month was polluting my mind with the latest infuriating nonsensical bullshit. I look forward to politics once again being background noise. Being boring. One can only hope.
Donald Trump leaves office tomorrow as the worst President in the history of the United States. I thought we’d have to wait 100 years to definitively say this — as it turns out, we didn’t even have to wait 100 months. By basically any measure you can muster both quantitatively and qualitatively he’s the worst. Yes, history will highlight this further, and really drive home what a mistake we made here. But tomorrow is a day to celebrate the fact that it’s over for those of us who recognize this in full right now.
Because Trump was such a stain on our country, everything I’ve written politically in the past four years comes across as decidedly Democrat. But truth be told, I don’t really like the Democrats either. I mean, I like them because they’re the party opposed to Donald Trump. But they’re also the party that gave us Trump, in a way. They were too smug four years ago to see and focus on a real risk. Then they were too weak and ineffective to do anything about it once it became clear. And I truly worried they would fail to rise to the fight again. Thank god.
Republicans, meanwhile, now have revealed themselves to be for the most part spineless. They would not stand up to the most obvious failure of both a person and President. I would say that they should be ashamed, but clearly nothing can shame them at this point. Again, except time, which will do the job for us, eventually.
The fact that 70-plus million people still voted for this joker is the worst indictment of our country I could possibly imagine. It’s honestly fucked up. He’s a con man who doesn’t even try to hide that fact. He touts it. The con this time couldn’t have gotten any bigger: convincing millions of people to vote against their own self interest. The corrupt ones are easy. It’s this other batch that is truly troublesome.
It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that these people, for lack of a better word, are just dumb. I’ve made that mistake too. Oddly, I think there’s a silver lining of the QAnon bullshit, in that it highlights that at least a subset of the people in this bucket are really just bored. Or lost. Or lonely. Or all of the above.
That’s a failure of society. Which probably more directly than indirectly led to Donald Trump. We need to figure that out.
I’m mainly happy that we bought ourselves at least four years of an administration that for the most part shouldn’t lead the country from one self-own to the next. Will President Biden fuck up? Sure. All Presidents do. Will he fuck up on a daily basis, multiple times a day, often on purpose? One would hope not. Our warming world with its fires and pandemics is scary enough as it is. We don’t need more drama. We need some stability. Good riddance, Trump.
