Tell you what, friends and neighbors — I’m about ready to give up.
In the months since the “election,” I’ve discovered a quality in myself that I don’t particularly care for, but it may be the only thing that gets me through the next however-many years we might have left before everything goes up in a mushroom cloud.
Your friendly neighborhood KoSC is becoming a curmudgeon. A dyed-in-the-wool cynic who is getting to the point where he wonders why he bothered to try, if it was all just going to go to hell in a handbasket anyway. What was the point of his PhD? Nobody listens. Why did he bother going into education? Nobody cares.
A month ago, while it was still sinking in that Cheetoface had actually won, no matter how dodgy that win was, and that he was actually going to take the highest office in the land, I was working in my planner, trying to figure out how to plan when the world had just gone to sh*t all around me.
Today’s date in my month calendar is labeled, in big, capital letters:
THE WORLD ENDS TODAY.
And it does. Maybe not the physical world, but certainly the cultural world that we have all lived in under President Obama’s leadership for the last 8 years. I’m not saying he was a perfect President. But he is infinitely preferable to the dreck that has been shoved down our throats by the unwashed, willfully stupid masses who have themselves been played like Stradivarius violins by a group of men who have been plotting this takeover of our nation for at least forty years and probably longer.
I can’t look at my planner. What’s to plan for? It’s all gone to hell in a handbasket, and there’s no way to turn back the clock and GOTV and make people understand that the Hair That Would Be King is a bullet that we were not going to be able to dodge unless everyone did their part.
But maybe this is the way it has to be. Maybe every liberal in the United States has to have their world end, in order to realize that it was worth fighting for. I know that my marriage is precious to me because, as a gay man married to a man, I had to fight for it. I know that my rights as a gay man are precious to me because I, and the generation before me who are my friends and the men I look up to, had to fight for it. Some died for it.
But saying that is cynical, right? Of course people knew that health care, reproductive rights, financial safety, good educations, equal rights, and clean environments were worth fighting for. Didn’t they?
Didn’t they?
* * *
Do you know when I began to really doubt that Hillary Clinton would win?
It was when I read The Handmaid’s Tale. I had never read it before. Generally, I have been the kind of person who eats up dystopian fiction — 1984, Brave New World, This Perfect Day, The Hunger Games — yeah, that’s been my kind of stuff.
But I had never encountered The Handmaid’s Tale until about a week before the “election.” I read it in about a day (I’m a quick reader; always have been).
And that’s when the pit of my stomach began to sink. Because the world that the narrator described was far, far too plausible if a Certain Candidate ever came to power. He may be stupid, but his goons are not — and that book described the future that many of them were actively pushing for.
That’s when I began compulsively refreshing fivethirtyeight.com.
That’s when I began to wonder if the buffoon could actually win.
That’s when I stopped sleeping more than three or four hours a night — and having nightmares when I did.
Because it was too late. Far, far too late. I had spent the summer laughing — like so many of us idiots had — and thinking It Couldn’t Happen Here.
I was wrong. I was so wrong.
And now I will wonder for whatever remains of my life — and with Cheetoface about to get control of the nuclear codes, I don’t expect it to be all that long — if I could have done more to stop it.
If I could have sounded an alarm somehow.
If I could have just made people see the reality of what was coming.
But all I had was a sinking feeling and a dystopian novel to blame it on. I had nothing concrete, you see.
And I knew from my experience as a teacher that you can lead them to the water, but you cannot make them drink. You can show them, tell them, explain it to them, break it down for them — but you cannot learn it for them, and you cannot understand it for them.
Our belief that we could convince people with facts is probably what turned off those 77,000 or so people who swung the balance in this “election” against us. It’s probably why they pulled the lever for the end of the world.
We screwed up in ways that there aren’t words for, folks.
* * *
I’ll also be honest. I hated the first three Star Wars prequels. They were lame compared to the original trilogy. But there was one scene that stuck with me from Episode III — Amidala saying, in an undertone to Senator Organa, as the arena cheers the elevation of Palpatine to Emperor:
“So this is how liberty dies — with thunderous applause.”
Now, the numbers of people who are going to attend the Inaugural are apparently quite small, in a historic sense. But never fear. They’ll bring megaphones and whistles and those long, tacky plastic horns you see at football games. They’ll make lots of noise. The applause may not be quite “thunderous,” but it will definitely be loud. And I’m sure that there will be many paid seat-fillers who will do their best to pretend that they love what’s happening, even if they’re gibbering with panic inside.
This is how the world ends: in a sea of stupid people who are too stupid to know that they’re stupid, cheering on a man who doesn’t have the first clue how to do the job he was (s)elected for.
This is how the world ends: in a sea of people who should have known better but thought “Oh, it can’t happen here” and stayed home on the day that could have kept the world from burning.
This is how the world ends — and whether it’s a bang, a whimper, or thunderous applause really does not matter in the end.
I’m going to just quote Matthew Modine here, from And The Band Played On:
“This didn’t have to happen. We could have stopped it.”
Yeah. We could have.
But we didn’t.
Edit: Waking up to the Rec list was both shocking and humbling. Thank you, folks. I’ll try to rein in the cynicism as we go forward into this dark time...