Ten days in, and here we are.

Pretty much as expected, really. We were promised a wave of executive orders, and we got them. We were promised time to think about things not relating to an idiot tinpot wannabe dictator, and we got that.

And if Republicans didn’t exactly promise they would try to sweep the Capitol siege under the rug, we’re not surprised we’re getting that, too.

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Then came a quiet morning when Mr. Biden opened a door on the north side. A warm draft of rising air blew softly through the Capitol cellar. The baby Bernies felt the warm updraft. One Bernie climbed to the top of the security fence. Then it did something that came as a great surprise to Wilbur.

The Bernie stood on its head, pointed its mittens in the air, and let loose a cloud of thick yarn. The yarn formed a balloon. As Wilbur watched, the Bernie let go of the fence and rose into the air.

“Good-bye!” it said, as it sailed past the Washington Monument.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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