Sunday, November 06, 2016                                            8:23 PM

No one recognizes the tremendous strain I’m under—and that is as it should be. It’s bad enough that I have to deal with it. But I miss the days when I could complain, without feeling selfish for laying my crap on someone else’s day. Ah, the oblivion of youthful self-indulgence… Thems was de days, uh?

Why do they put nothing on TV all week—and then put four good shows on at 9PM on Sunday night? What the fuck is that?

We are now seeing the bleed-through on fundamentalism—this election season (season? It’s been two years!) has brought forth a group of people with their own facts—facts that counter what most of us accept as facts; it has brought out a hatred of ‘unbelievers’ usually reserved for ISIS recruits (and, as with most ‘religions’, evil is a woman).

Fundamentalists hate gays and demean women—not because those people are evil individuals, but because some preacher says so. So it is with Trump supporters—they are perfectly comfortable hating Hillary, not because she is evil, but because Trump says so. How else does one demonize a grandmother with a lifetime’s public service?

I’m not saying that all Trump supporters are fundies, or that all fundies support Trump—I’m just saying that the adherence to an alternate reality is the same in both.

But it’ll all be over tomorrow, thank god. Trump may get elected—and I will be heartbroken if he is—but at least I’ll know that the America I believed in is not the same as the America most Americans believe in, that the dream I had was already dead. I won’t sit chewing my nails, like I have for months, worrying about how Trump will destroy us—I’ll just take it as a given. I won’t feel any need to watch the news ever again, because I’ll know that none of it will be good, and the time has passed when we could have stopped it.

When Hillary wins, as she should, things will be more complicated—because that will mean that the fight continues. It will mean that deluded morons are still the minority here. They won’t be in charge, but they’ll still be here, shouting all kinds of stupidity, making all kinds of plans to obstruct Hillary—it’ll be less ‘over’ than if Trump wins, which makes it a bigger hassle. But that’s what a working democracy is—a big hassle.

Compromise is never easy. Getting any group of people to agree on anything is hard work—and, as with our present politics, losing the will to compromise makes it nearly impossible. We need to get back to the understanding that freedom of religion means you believe whatever you want, not that you do whatever you want. We need to get back to the understanding that government is public service first and politics second.

Ah, but look at me—I barely have the will to post this. And by tomorrow, it won’t be worth posting. I have learned one thing—or rather, I always knew it but this election has really brought it home: the Republican party, as a whole, is not uniformly crazy—there are plenty of good people there. Their problem is that they are the magnet for the bullying rich and the crazies. And those bad apples are tearing apart the GOP just as they are forcing the GOP to polarize the voters.

Which makes sense—Conservatism gives the bullying rich and the crazies more fertile ground than the Progressives (not that they are entirely neglected by the crazies and the rich). Pure political Conservatism is hard to come by—today’s issues often paint Conservatives into a corner, changing their views from ‘different’ to ‘wrong’—as in the case of gay marriage. With gay marriage, the opposing sides used to be ‘differing views’, but advancing social awareness has made denying gays their civil rights a negative ideal. Opponents of gay civil rights are now accused of hate speech, rather than disagreed with. So we can see that being a Conservative in modern times involves a lot of concessions—and the whole point of being a Conservative is to fight against change. It must be terribly confusing for them.

Meanwhile, you have the charlatans—and politics attracts more than their share. So while conservatives feel stymied by the ‘woke’ enlightenment, their politics become infested with rabble-rousers, people who know that the best way to take advantage of a situation is to create a crisis and blame it on someone else. Hopefully tomorrow’s election will be another in America’s long confrontations with these cynical demagogues, where the good guys band together and keep the American Experiment alive.