Pitch black night of the soul

When you perceive your neighbors, friends you’ve known since childhood, even your own family members as enemies, then we’ve already lost.

Boy, did David pick the wrong week to go on vacation. Or maybe it was a great time for HIM to be unplugged, but he asked me last week if I could make any contributions this week to help out Jay and Steve. I gladly agreed and put together some drafts of thoughts that I’d been pondering for a while.

I won’t be sharing any of those today. They no longer feel – relevant.

Image: Kipish_fön

Saturday night, I was at Truist park attending a concert with friends to celebrate my birthday. Shortly after it started, one of them overheard the guy next to him say Donald Trump had been shot. We immediately pulled out our phones and started scrolling for updates. CNN was slow to provide details, so I switched over to the website formally known as Twitter. There I found every possible bad take that could be expressed. Congressman Mike Collins immediately accused President Biden of ordering the hit. (Which I guess would qualify for immunity as an official act now, right?) Secret Service failure was blamed on DEI. Some expressed disappointment that the attempt had failed. Many on the right (including our old boss) were blaming the media. Leftists were convinced that the shooting was faked and Trump was in on the plan to boost his election chances. Republicans speculated that the shooter was ANTIFA. And there were posts of the photo of Trump defiantly holding up a fist with confident predictions that THIS would assure Trump’s election and “You’re definitely getting Project 2025 now.”

I’ve never been an optimist. I prefer to be occasionally surprised rather than being constantly disappointed, to quote Benjamin Franklin. I’m more Bobby Knight than Norman Vincent Peale. I have truly harnessed the power of negative thinking. It’s why I’m in customer service instead of sales. Believing deep in my black little heart that everything that can WILL go wrong, and knowing that I’ll be the one to clean up the mess, has made me vigilant for prospective disaster. My go-to coping mechanism is to question “What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen?” Followed by “And THEN what are you going to do?” I kept an empty box in the trunk of my car for over a year, because I knew my employer was struggling financially and that it was just a matter of time before I got called in one Friday and told to clean out my desk. And I was right.

So I’m pretty darn hard to disappoint, but Saturday’s events and the reaction to it – from ALL sides – did it. I wasn’t even shocked at the violence. We’ve been repeatedly told that life as we know it will end if our side loses the election. That message has been repeated through several election cycles. Remember when Joe Biden told a black audience that if Mitt Romney won, they’d be back in chains? Good times. Rush Limbaugh rattled off a laundry list of liberal evils that Barack Obama was going to implement if he were elected. Women have been cosplaying in red capes in the belief that we were living out the Handmaid’s Tale. Fox News and the last Trump campaign did such a thorough job of brainwashing their followers that people stormed capitol and erected gallows out front on which to hang the Vice President of the United States. Three and a half years later, 60% of Republicans STILL believe the election was stolen. And let’s not forget that the victim himself told his supporters “If you don’t fight like hell, we’re not going to have a country anymore.” Are you shocked that there was violence? I’m shocked that there hasn’t been more.

Now we’re hearing a handful of reasonable people calling for unity. Republicans are supposedly rewriting this week’s convention speeches to tone down the rhetoric. MSNBC cancelled Morning Joe today. The Daily Show won’t be sending their roaming correspondent to interview attendees. President Biden has called for Americans to “temper their passions.” It won’t last. You don’t get to call your opponent an existential threat to democracy and then walk it back. You can’t say that the left hates America and is out to destroy it, but can’t we all get along now? We’ve been building up to this for years now. It doesn’t even matter which candidate wins in November. There will be anger and most likely violence. Again. We’ve gone from voting FOR a candidate, to voting for the lesser of two evils, to voting against the guy we hate the most. If people determine that winning elections won’t bring them their desired goal, the next step is to go full “dracarys” on everyone.

I’ve always wondered how a nice country like Germany could have ever elected a man like Hitler, then watch him conduct genocide against every marginalized group society declared unfit. Now, I look around at my fellow Americans and I totally get it. Because when you perceive your neighbors, friends you’ve known since childhood, even your own family members as enemies, then we’ve already lost. I could even understand every bad impulse displayed on Twitter. I say that not in boast, but in shame. This election has broken me. I don’t feel any impulse to go out and defend “my side” in this fight. I don’t have a side anymore. Which is the worst thing I could ever imagine and I don’t have a plan to fix it.

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