The Witness Chronicles, 10/24/24

Post-election America

Photo by pepe nero on Unsplash

Looking Past the Election: the View is Murky

Is there a Zen monastery I can hide in?

With Trump promising to punish his critics if elected, one wonders how wide a net they would cast. It’s important to understand that totalitarian regimes ultimately only work if all dissenters are shut down, including the little guys and their readers.

China is known for their thousands of public cameras and facial recognition. Russia for its secret police and assassinations. North Korea is a black hole of enforced uniformity. Mussolini’s fascist regime had everyone informing on everyone else. Hitler simply rounded up all those he disliked and murdered them by the millions.

So, when a candidate for president of the United States says he will exact revenge on those who opposed him, take it seriously, even if he is a deeply unserious man, because humans have done this to each other throughout history.

Trump plays the clown, but under the thick makeup is a true sociopath, a man who happily dances on the graves of those who gave their lives for the country he once led and would lead again. Ironically, the man who demands total loyalty never returns that loyalty. We are seeing that daily as former lieutenants reveal how he turned on them and will do the same to the American people.

No one is immune to his need for retribution. Not you or I or anyone else.

I think about what happens after November fifth when the dust settles, if it settles. I’ve spent the last year or so writing about daily politics and none of that writing has been charitable to the former President, because there is nothing to be charitable about. There aren’t many people I can say that about with a clear conscience.

Most of the names that come to mind are the dictators, Putin, Orban, Xi Jinping, Kim. I think it is fair to include Trump in that list of inhuman humans. He certainly appears to desperately want to join the club. But what club will I join if he is re-elected?

I continue to have faith in the sanity of American voters but that faith is being tested daily as Trump gets more and more unhinged and we still see mobs cheering his every incomprehensible word. Mob is the operative word here. We’ve seen what a Trump mob is capable of. It’s a kind of collective insanity that can be very hard to undo. Especially if no one is even trying to undo it.

In my lifetime we have seen this before with men like Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy (before my time), but this time around the mob is bigger, more organized, and fully funded, and even more cynical in their pursuit of power. And they are willing to commit violence. In Arizona a man was arrested this week for firing bullets into a Democratic campaign office three times. They found 120 guns in his home.

That sounds like an organized campaign to arm terrorists to me. Not a gun collection, an arms cache. Also in Arizona this week a ballot box was set on fire. I just hope no one on either side is killed in the name of presidential politics, including Trump. I’m not a hater, though I see no redeeming virtue in the man.

Trump is just the poster boy. It’s doubtful he would serve out much of his term if elected and then we’d be stuck with Vance, a possibly worse outcome.

I realize as I write this that it’s pretty bleak, because it is. We literally have to elect Kamala Harris or there may never be another election. I think, and hope, that we will do the right thing. Otherwise I may need to find that hidden Zen temple and disappear.

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