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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• The First Mohel
• Angels We Have Heard While High
• I Saw Mommy Kissing Daddy’s Boss

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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.

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We noted with pleasure the other day that there are now enough certified state elections to give Joe Biden 270 electoral votes.

We will probably make the same observation when members of the Electoral College cast their votes on December 14.

And again when their votes are counted by Congress on January 6.

We have been voting in presidential elections for forty years. Never before did the steps between election day and inauguration matter to us, or anyone, really. They were just part of the paperwork.

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