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What’s Coming?

I’m sure you’re wondering what will happen when Trump assumes the Presidency in January. His cabinet nominees are a scary lot, their collective incompetence and venality breathtaking to behold, and the things Trump says he’s going to do are scary, too. By scary I mean almost sure to wreak economic, social, and emotional havoc on large sectors of the country and the world.

Yet we the people elected him and elected a Congress poised to pass his havoc-wreaking bills and laws. Which suggests to me that there is something going on here that is not about Trump and his kind per se, but about our society and our collective predilections.

I avoid imbibing much news because most news is untrue or simply recounting senseless violence, but I imbibe enough to know that ninety (90) million Americans who could have voted in the last election did not vote. That is more people than all the people who voted for Donald Trump. More than one in three Americans who could have voted chose not to.

I happen to know three people who chose not to vote. I not only know them, I like them. And when they told me before the election they were not going to vote, I asked them why. Their three answers were: I find the whole thing too upsetting, they are all liars, the whole thing is rigged.

I did vote, though I did so knowing that the issues I care most about were of little concern to either party or presidential candidate: ending the genocide of the Palestinians by the Israelis financed by the United States, installing a Single Payer healthcare system, ending our dependency on fossil fuels, saving the postal service, and drastically reducing military spending – none of which either candidate cared about.

Since Jimmy Carter was President, the only meaningful reason I have ever come up with for voting for the candidate of the Democratic Party was that they tended to appoint intelligent humane people to the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Otherwise, in my opinion, there was little substantive difference between the two parties and the incompetent venal people they presented as options.

My prediction is that Trump’s policies will create economic and social chaos, and it will dawn on many of the people who voted for him and many of the 90 million people who didn’t vote that they made a boo-boo. Trump will then do one of two things. Continue wreaking havoc until the Democrats regain control of both houses of Congress in 2026, or do whatever he has to do to keep that from happening, including suspending the laws of the land. 

I’m hoping, cynically, this is just another chapter in The Sickening Enrichment of the Already Obscenely Wealthy at the Expense of Everyone Else, and not something more nefarious. In either case, I remind myself that we the people created this situation through our past actions and non-actions.

fin

The Way Things Go from Todd’s CD Lounge Act In Heaven.