What a wonderful year to be alive. We live in a world where information can be accessed in seconds. No other society has ever had the tools Americans have today to keep themselves informed and knowledgeable about the world around us. And yet, we're currently suffering through a pandemic that has claimed the lives of over 200,000 Americans and most of the people in my part of Indiana act as though nothing has happened. I had a good friend tell me the other day that he considered the pandemic to be "fake and gay," whatever the fuck that means. This is someone with a college degree from a good private school. Whatever. Where we get our news from really matters these days. Many people have abandoned traditional sources like journalistic outlets for propaganda spinners like Breitbart or straight up bullshit served on Facebook. Whether or not you think we're heading toward an abyss depends on whether you've drank the conservative kool-aid or not.
President Trump has refused to say that he will concede the election. His campaign is apparently"discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority," according to this terrifying Atlantic article. No wonder Republicans have spent so much time attempting to delegitimize mail in voting. Now that there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court, I feel very confident in our democracy, don't you? If we have another Bush vs. Gore scenario, a 6-3 conservative majority probably hands Trump the election, no matter how legitimate his argument is.
Many moons ago, Sinclair Lewis argued in It Can't Happen Here that an authoritarian takeover of the United States could, in fact, happen. The modern Republican Party has laid the groundwork, studious searching for loopholes in the Constitution while stacking the Federal Judiciary and brainwashing their base. No matter what happens, I guarantee that November 4 will be a clusterfuck. Whether or not the GOP decides to plunge our country into a doomsday scenario depends on to what degree their base and the political establishment go along with it. I don't have a lot of faith in the reasoning ability of Trumpers. I don't have a lot of faith in the principles of the GOP. I don't see people like my aforementioned friend raising much of a fuzz over a Trump coup. What matters to them is the reinforcement of social conservatism and the preservation of white male Christian superiority. So it's up to the rest of us to not sit on our hands. The time for donating and volunteering is nigh. We have to do what we can. Even writing little articles on a shitty blog like this one is better than doing nothing, or at least that's what I'm telling myself. If the time to protest comes, then protest. I don't want to tell my children that I did nothing.
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