Reflections on These Past Eight Days

Illustration from www.davidpgushee.com

For the record, I voted for who I felt was the most qualified candidate, the one who would be best for my life and our country.

Which doesn't really tell you anything about who I voted for, because everyone who voted did that as well.

That's what I keep coming back to these past eight days. Everyone did what they thought was the right thing, what was best for them.

Because of that, I can't expect anyone who voted one way to change their decision simply because it would be better for me. The opposite is also true. I suspect that's true of us all.

We'll never know the outcome of the other timeline or which one would have been better. In a truly strange way, I hope the other side is right because I don't want to see what happens if they're wrong.

I've managed to (mostly) stay away from social media. 2016 taught me that no amount of rational argument or righteous anger will change the result or anyone's mind. We came to a fork in the road and this is the path we're now on. There's no going back.

I worry about my modest nest egg, my marriage, my health, the state of our nation, society and the world. I try to comfort myself by remembering that--aside from tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, and some truly regrettable Supreme Court picks--the Trump 1.0 administration was a near-daily parade of embarrassing gaffes and minor scandals, most related to monetizing the presidency.

Except, of course, for covid and its mismanaged response.

During Thanksgiving of 2016 J___ and I had L____ A____ and her kids over for dinner. They were all worried about what was to come. In an effort to give them some perspective and comfort, I shared that I'd lived through the '80s, and Reagan, and AIDS. "I won't really worry," I told them, "until people are actually dying every day." 

On the one hand, I take heart in the old saying that "the way you do one thing is the way you do everything." Barring another worldwide pandemic or similar catastrophe, perhaps this second Trump presidency will be just as bumbling and mendacious as the first, with few long-lasting ramifications.

On the other hand, I'm also aware that the sequel is almost always worse than the original, and we could be in for a(nother) literal world of hurt, one so awful that we'll yearn for the relative simplicity and ease of those previous four years.

Slightly more than one-third of us are happy and looking forward to the future. Slightly less than a third aren't and fretting about what it may bring. If things had been slightly different, everything would be different. But this would probably be the same: I'd still be trying to understand why that other side feels the way they do.

And then there's the other third who, for whatever reason, couldn't or didn't bother to even take a position on what kind of future they thought would be best for themselves.

They're the ones I understand least of all.