The Witness Chronicles, September 7, 2024

This thing needs to be over

Photo by Kelli Dougal on Unsplash

I Am Sick To Death of Politics

But this year we cannot ignore the danger we face

Last week I lost internet connectivity after a thunderstorm did something to my 5g device or a cell tower failed or something. It took a few hours with a very patient customer support person (thanks Anna from T-Mobile!) and some waiting to finally get it back.

So, two days without Internet. The horror.

Early on I used up my phone’s data creating a hotspot, so I was essentially disconnected for a while. I write on an iPad with Google Docs so I could keep working, but to publish I had to walk to a nearby cafe, get a coffee, and do my thing there. No big deal, actually it was a nice change.

But I noticed a part of my brain chilled out from not having the constant stream of US politics that I normally indulge in. It’s been more than crazy this year and it seems to be accelerating as we watch one candidate falling to pieces mentally while the other is riding a wave of Democrat exhilaration at having her as a choice.

But I want it to be over and I’m far from alone. I want Trump and Vance and their bully boys to go back into whatever holes they crawled out of. Kind of like the orcs in Rings of Power if you’re a Tolkien nerd, which I am. Vermin is a kind description, but not one mainstream media would ever descend to.

Which is why I keep writing and more readers join in every day. Our system, the one the right wants to destroy, has plenty of flaws, but has worked for nearly 250 years and we have to fight for our right to not care because things just work. A lot of voters have checked out on the news and I can see why.

But I’m still in it. As I write this I’m not even certain I will publish this, but it’s a Saturday morning, very cool and fall-like, and I’m feeling the change of seasons a bit more acutely. It feels like the kind of day to reassess things, including what I will write about if the air ever clears and Trump finally goes away.

Unfortunately, even if he loses, and I think he will, it seems pretty obvious that his machine will do what they did last time, though on a much bigger scale. It won’t be a bunch of angry wackos breaking down doors in the Capital this time. Instead it will be hordes of lawyers and a constant flood of propaganda cranked out by a vast network of right wing ‘news’ sites.

The Department of Justice just shut a bunch of them down, and tracked down their source directly to Putin’s Russia. Which means they may have hit the surface of the iceberg. But the rest are down there just under the surface. This thing ain’t over yet, not by a long shot.

And that’s why I have no intention of stopping my little contribution to trying to maintain the sanity in the face of the crazy. Believe me, it’s not for the money. I’ve never made less, but I get by.

Part of the payment I receive is the support and dialog I get here. I reach a small number of people, a tiny fraction who care deeply about all of this, but I’m engaged enough to know there are a lot more of us. We saw it during the Democratic National Convention which turned out to be some of the best entertainment this year, a celebration of somehow turning a corner. And it was apropos that it was followed by the Olympics, a real joy fest.

But now we are in the deep end with two months to go and somehow Trump maintains his hold on half the voters, though there are cracks in his machine. The man’s schtick is tired and his message of chaos and doom doesn’t seem like what we want to hear this time.

That machine may be preparing for a war against the legitimate system but I think he is underestimating how sick we all are of this fake anger, and the real hate. The man lives in a bubble of his own making, not even pretending to care about facts and reality.

Next week, on Tuesday night, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will debate, if you can call it that. There is wide speculation that Harris will win and Trump will go off message and into whatever mishmash runs in his head. At the last debate all we all watched, in horror, Joe Biden failing, but I went back and read some transcripts of what Trump actually said.

I had to because I turned the debate off about ten minutes in, recognizing that things had just become as bad as the Democratic Party has ever faced. But I learned something from actually reading Trump’s words that night. The man is mentally ill and delusional. He ‘won’ the debate but the reality was that Biden lost it and lost it almost immediately.

But Kamala Harris is not an 81 year old man coping with unbelievable pressure and Donald Trump is still that guy with the mental illness. We are going to see something that rarely takes place in American politics, a true second turnaround from a disaster.

At least that’s the hope. And that hope is why I’m sticking with waving my word flag over here in my corner. I hope you’ll stay with me.

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