I believe that it will take a while to figure out the new normal when it comes to life in these United States. Last Wednesday was stage one of the cycles of grief. We were all in some form of denial. But then, in the next few days we have all mostly gone through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance all in a jumbled mass of emotions. Actually, I feel like denial was really more like amazement. Anger was more like resignation. Bargaining had to do with deciding how I would act towards the outside world from here on in. Depression never really hit me. I was not happy. I was sad. I was tired. I was detached. But I’m not sure I am really all that capable of depression. I’ve spoken before about my good fortune in having an over abundance of serration in in my system and I suspect that I may actually be incapable of depression in the traditional clinical sense. I always see the sunshine in the morning and I almost always arise with good thoughts and not bad ones. All of that is to say that I think I tend to go from whatever form of bargaining there is to be done to acceptance so that I can move on and get back to being optimistic. Maybe that tells me that instead of depression, I might suffer from a lack of optimism momentarily, but then even that goes away quite quickly and I’m back to seeing the sunny skies this morning. Good for me, right? I apologize for my Pollyanna ways, but as Popeye would always say, “I yam what I yam!”
I have spent the week processing a lot of stories and they are all about the fears that people are facing with this new world order as everyone is calling it. I spent the later part of 2016 telling everyone that a Trump presidency would not really be so bad as we all thought. I specifically said that those who thought he was going to do all the nasty things he talked about would be disappointed and that those who were afraid of what would happen next, I said he would do what all politicians do when they win, he would move towards the center and want to prove himself more presidential than others thought he could be. Well, we all know that I was dead wrong about all sides of that outcome. It is safe to say that he was far worse and got progressively worse as his term went on. I tend to think that had mostly to do with all the efforts to attack him and make him fit into the normal bands of acceptable behavior, which he was, indeed, incapable of doing. The more he realized that he could get away with anything he wanted to get away with, the more he let his freak flag fly higher and higher. It’s what led to this strange cycle we have had for the last four years of him raising his fist in defiance and him sobbing about how unjustifiably put-upon he is. The bully/victim cycle has been extreme to say the least.
There are lots and lots of woulda, coulda, shoulda articles floating around these days. It all makes me wonder what woulda happened if right after January 6th, and as soon as the new administration was installed, the full weight of the prosecutorial gavel had been brought down on him and he had been convicted of some version of insurrection and thereby firmly disqualified from holding future office or perhaps even incarcerated. There were, indeed, four full years to do that, but the normative approach of trying to be overly fair and respectful to an ex-President prevailed and the window for action was lost. Granted, there was some help from the Supreme Court and several lower courts along the way, but that might not have happened if action were taken earlier. But forget about Trump for a moment and let’s just say he went by the wayside in a manner that might well have better suited many Republicans’ wishes in addition to the entirety of the blue world. What would have happened in this country? Would things really be different or would they be more or less the same with different names on the ballot?
That to me is the most intriguing question. I’m not sure I would have worried about this before last Tuesday, but now it is a very obvious question to ask. Did Trump bring about this shift in American sentiment towards the right or did the shift towards the right merely provide the wave that Trump has ridden so very well? That is not a new question to be sure, but when it was asked in the past, we did not have the evidence of the shift that the election gave us. I think it is a far more poignant issue for consideration now because it will help inform us of what we have in store in the future. I have used the Brexit example many times since that passed in 2016 and it threw the U.K. Into an economic and political tizzy that has now resulted in fairly extreme political swings that have taken them through extreme conservatism and now landed them into progressive hands. These are all signs of people’s displeasure with the process of government while wanting the fruits of government. I fear that we are in for some similar swings in this country.
I find it funny when people suggest that Trump was a direct result of Obama for eight years. I think that is nonsense unless you believe that the country is totally guided by racist thinking. The existence of deep-seated racism in this country is undeniable, but what Obama did for eight years was enough to show everyone that the worst that this particular black man would do was dare to wear a khaki suit. Yes, he put in place Obamacare (the ACA), but that was hardly radical if looked at on the global stage. He was not so different from any other president and those white folks like me were very happy that he showed the less accepting in the country that black did not need to translate into ghetto. Strangely enough, the Obama replacement, Donald Trump, was far more radical and socially/culturally extreme than Obama ever was. Trump is the ultimate ghetto rat in the way he talks, thinks and acts. It so happens that his ghetto is more overwhelmed with glam and bling than it is with garbage cans, but it is no less in the gutter than a racist’s worst nightmare. And now we put grandpa back in charge to heal the nation from all that and he did a fine job of getting us through the Pandemic and back to work with good use of the stimulus lever (I know we can disagree on how much is enough or too much, but it did work). He also tried VERY hard to take us back to our Middle Class roots and make America better for the regular folks. But they weren’t having it. The rent was just too damn high.
So, now, here we are, into a whole new dream sequence. I say dream and not reality mostly because until he gets installed on January 20th, we are not certain of what he will do and how good or bad he will be. All we have left for these 70 days is our dreams. I refuse to call them nightmares because I feel we need to reserve those for when things actually happen that scare us. Right now we are scared of what we THINK might happen to us. So, at least for the next 70 days, I plan on living the dream and waking up on January 20th with as clean a slate as I can.