The day that the good news came in from Philadelphia nailing the presidency for Biden, I was as usual at work at my screen. After days of uneasiness and fear and preoccupation with the future of the world, I was relieved. Not that Biden was a savior of humankind but that compared with Trump he was and is.
That night I found an hour-long session of various renditions of Ave Maria, vocal and instrumental, and just let it play and sat in a stupor, purely happy. There was such a sense during the Trump administration that doom was inevitable, that he'd stage a coup, that he'd sabotage our electoral system" It was even worse than the Bush II era, when I woke up each day to pessimism. It was others' misery we swam through day after day, meaningless deaths.. During Trump's time, it's our own misery along with others' misery brought to our shores, the assylum seekers', while we die off from covid, and no one's in charge. Some regulation is emanating from state and local governments.
How can this be happening? It didn't have to. Will we ever recover from Trump's four years? He'll not win another term without a violent takeover, which I wouldn't rule out. His Texans have said they're ready if he calls. It's certainly true that murder can't be swept under the rug, along with blatant corruption, spiteful corruption, a "because I could, because I can" in spades. That's not what the presidency is all about. A president can do a lot of good. A new direction must be struck. It will be good to punish Trump. He should spend the rest of his life in jail.
But if he is put behind us, he will only jump into the future, mutated more shrewdly, as has been prophesied. If we don't look back, we're doomed to repetition. Without a knowledge of the past and, I add, a constant remembrance of it as a lesson in what needs to be effaced, we're doomed to relive misery and ultimate destruction, Trump's fantasy realized. He wants to stand atop a heap of rubble beating his chest. And then what?
