underdogishere

Five years ago I told a joke. Not really a joke just a humorous aside that I used to say now and again in safe company. It went along the lines of “Please oh please let Trump be the Republican nominee”. Why would an intelligent person wish for this you ask? The answer was simple. Although I personally believed that Hillary would make a perfectly fine president I knew she was a flawed candidate. At the time there were some pretty well qualified Republican candidates running for the office and I thought the only way Hillary could be a shoo-in was if she was running against a sexist, racist, buffoon with a string of failures longer than your arm. Silly me, I had enough faith in America to believe that it would not elect someone who openly boasted of sexually assaulting women, who openly mocked the disabled and did everything within his power to divide the country. Turns out the joke was on me. Four years ago my faith in America came crashing down. Trump's election was an eye-opening experience, shedding a new light on who we are. I had allowed myself to believe that the election of Barack Obama heralded in a new era for our country. Certainly I was aware that there were wacko racists out there who believed in a 50 year old conspiracy to hide the 'truth' of Obama's birth. I had thought the wacko racists were a fringe group, four years ago I learned they were a majority (well, not quite a majority, Hillary did win the popular vote). Four years ago my faith in who we are as country died. I no longer recognized America. Overnight we changed from a country boldly leading the world to a new future into a freak show lead by a bullying, ignorant child-man who lacked the self-awareness to recognize his incredible stupidity. The most depressing part of, course, was the degree to which vast numbers of (mostly white) Americans worshiped the child-man, putting him above America itself. So four years ago I dropped out. I stopped listening to news channels and news radio. I would poke my head in every once in a while to keep abreast of what was happening but I felt no need to have a ringside seat for the dismantling of America. Instead I filled my hours with books on tape. I tried to get into podcasts but never really got hooked by any. I subscribed to an archaeology site but couldn't get into that either (archaeology was an early interest of mine). At night I used to listen to the BBC to lull myself to sleep, I turned that in for audio recordings of the Sherlock Holmes stories. By now I have listened to them all dozens of times. For the first time I regretted bringing children into the world, wondering what kind of world they would be living in when I am gone. (I took some comfort from the fact that they are white, it is obviously much easier to be white in the world of the trumpians). And now Biden has been elected. I am, of course, very happy. At the same time I am afraid to be hopeful for the future of America. The trumpians showed us once how quickly they can destroy everything America stands for. How long before they show us again? And can we ever step back from that?