That’s It. We’re Done. And “The People” Are to Blame…
As I was saying, if Trump’s side doesn’t lose, all of us, and the world as a whole, will. So we lost. And while some may continue to say that it was “only” yet another major battle out of a long string of them, still having any shred of a chance of a future that won’t seem pulled right out of the scariest dystopias or postapocalyptic works would take one hell of a fightback, using methods that the “good” side never accepted to touch in any way and probably won’t know how to properly employ even if, at least now that we’re already past the final hour, they’d be willing to do so. So, until and unless thoroughly proven wrong, my position is that this was the very final nail in the world’s coffin.
Not that there’d have been any reason to choose Harris, or Biden, or Democrats in general, other than to oppose Trump, and Republicans in general. At least ever since I started being able to find out what’s going on over there, the Democrats just stood for the status quo, business as usual while time runs out and a final day of reckoning for all of our choices draws ever nearer, never offering anyone who is actually looking for anything even remotely resembling the ever more necessary change any reason to vote for them other than to be against the others, who are clearly so much worse.
But it should have been painfully obvious to anyone with any shred of capacity and willingness to reason that this time around it was even worse than the usual difference between the two. I mean, that guy’s first term was bad enough, and now the world is caught up in so many crises, the environment is past the brink, Russia’s biting ever harder and China’s snarling and about to charge as well, Israel’s brazenly committing genocide, various others are also testing the limits, so a strong and positive US influence and actual intervention is more desperately needed globally than it’s been in decades… Yet what do US voters do? They choose that guy… And hand him full control of Congress as well. And it wasn’t a matter of external influence, of any trickery, or of some quirk of that messed up electoral system from over there; he was actually voted in, quite overwhelmingly, winning the popular vote as well, being directly supported by all those people… Which just follows the trend that’s also seen around here, with all of the victories of the far right and those from the mainstream normalizing and adopting such positions as well.
And no, there’s no way to justify this, so stop looking for excuses or other explanations. The plain and simple truth is that it’s what people in general typically do. As Pratchett put it, “The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.” Or, to also quote Babylon 5, “That does seem to be the rule, doesn’t it? Analyze the problem, choose whichever strategy makes least sense and then do it.” And this isn’t just one more of the practically infinite series of events that constantly prove this throughout humanity’s history, or even “just” a particularly powerful example. It’s true that some examples that are more obviously worse may be found, but considering the current state of the world and humanity’s current and foreseeable capacity for destruction, it may well be the one that actually marks the point of no return.
So, yeah… We’re done… But that doesn’t imply giving up. I was saying in that previous post that these US elections mark the beginning of the next stage of the fight, and while I’ll maintain that defeating Trump was absolutely necessary in order to still have any shred of a chance of success, that is not required in order to fight. Sometimes you fight because there’s nothing left to lose. Or because there’s nothing else left to do in the face of the oncoming disaster. Or just to know that you did what you could, and tried to be part of the solution to the bitter end. And, if anything, a lack of belief in success spares you of disappointment. It may make for little to take heart from and having less actual motivation than those who still, somehow, believe, but it also makes it practically impossible to make you completely lose heart. So, no matter the odds, keep fighting… Just know that the worst opponents aren’t the ones in power, who could be toppled the moment the people would set their mind to it, but just the people, or at least most of them, one way or another… And try to recognize how much of what causes that to be the case is in you as well.