You can’t listen to them.
You can’t take their word for it. You can’t stroll into that midwest diner, ask them what’s up, expect them to know their own souls.
They’re not going to be honest with you. They’re not being honest with themselves. They don’t know how. They don’t have to be. They weren’t raised that way. It’s not the world they were handed.
A world of their unquestioned dominance. A world theirs by birth. Born alpha dog. Born apex predator.
A world that doesn’t exist.
You could feel the ground shifting Wednesday afternoon. Something was different. Something had changed. Wherever this was going, there was no going back.
There would be consequences. Maybe not the kind we’d like, maybe not as soon as we’d like, but consequences nevertheless. Whatever the future was going to be, it would be something else now. The future would now be something that included this in the past.
The warnings had come true. Warnings for years, decades, generations. Warnings that if you kept looking the other way, kept letting things slide, kept letting them have their heads, kept moving on, this — this! — would happen.
And then it did.
The thing to understand is that 74,223,744 people voted for Donald Trump.
That’s almost 12 million more votes than last time.
Trump lost both votes, of course. He lost by almost 3 million four years ago, and by 7 million last November.
But still, he gained. Four years of this — four years of all this — and he improved. Substantially.
Thing is, these are real people. You probably know a few. If you’re unfortunate, you know a lot. You know where they come from. You know how they think.
You know the problem.
It’s really difficult to take it all in.
Not just the 340,146 deaths. All of it.
There was a news story making the rounds that the covid toll is so high now, it’s beyond human comprehension. This has not been a problem for us. We check the numbers every day.
Time was, not so long ago, that a typical weekday might see a thousand or fifteen hundred new corpses on the books. Lately, more like three thousand. One recent day the number jumped by more than four thousand.
Not hard to comprehend at all.
We must admit, we were surprised on Saturday. We were expecting others to join the Texas GOP’s call for secession — that being the logical next step in the Republican Passion Play — perhaps even a series of tweets from the top suggesting that the faithful take matters into their own hands.
Instead, they started turning on each other.
NOJO • Noon, January 20, 2021 So much of the past four years was clinging to sanity, seeing the truth that others would deny. Not…
NOJO • Noon, January 20, 2021 Twitter today: Joy and Bernie memes. No Trump. Feels like old times. FB today: Got into a tussle…
JNOV • Noon, January 20, 2021 BON JOVI AT THE SHORE! BON JOVI AT THE SHORE! I don't even like Bon Jovi, but I sure as shit like…
JNOV • Noon, January 20, 2021 Really, Lily-white Portland? Really? We need to put benzos in the water supply.
JNOV • Noon, January 20, 2021 @¡Andrew!: Dude down the street removed the Trump sign from his garage. Progress!
JNOV • Noon, January 20, 2021 @¡Andrew!: FCS (which are also the initials of a school I went to), knows what's up with his…
¡ANDREW! • Noon, January 20, 2021 Turn Tr666p over to the Ru$$ian mob immediately. He and the zillions of rubles he owes are their…
¡ANDREW! • Noon, January 20, 2021 Diana Ross is Tha Qween, full stop. It still doesn't feel real that the ~5 year-long racist…
JNOV • Noon, January 20, 2021 @nojo: I appreciate all that you do, especially not listing the numerous times I…
NOJO • Noon, January 20, 2021 @JNOV: Management may have some headspace for geeking now that Management isn’t preoccupied with…