The Slow Steady March Towards Destruction

Will the Democrats Be Able to Undo the Damage?

In a word… No.

With RBG’s passing this past week, and it becoming abundantly clear that the Republicans will ensure they get some to fill her seat before the end of the year, my optimism that the country will survive all of this intact has taken a serious hit.

At the same time, I see the Democrats doing something they don’t do very often. They are letting their anger and frustration motivate them to come up with a plan.

Suddenly this week I started to see some light at the end of the tunnel. I hear talk of adding seats to the Supreme Court to balance the membership, instead of making it a completely Republican controlled body. I hear statisticians talking about the very real possibility of a Democrat majority in both the House and Senate. I see Biden’s polling numbers continue to rise while Trumps falter and decline.

Part of me started to get a little excited.

Then I start hearing Trump supporters talking about rioting and rebelling if he isn’t re-elected. I see social media outlets and other groups talking about the steps necessary to prepare for civil unrest regardless of the outcome on November 3rd (or whenever the final votes are finally counted). I hear Trump’s campaign talking about a plan to enable Governors to appoint electors if they believe voting has been compromised.

And another part of me started to get scared. Really scared.

Since 2016, my faith in human beings to do the right thing and rise to meet the challenges and adversity brought on by the selfish and uncompassionate among us has been diminished over and over again. This latest surge of narrow sighted choices and divisive policy leads me to fear more than ever before that we are headed for collapse.

Trump and his ilk are repeating over and over that the election results will be tainted. Of course he has no evidence that tampering will happen, and no one is even talking about the fact that all research and investigation into voter fraud in this country has revealed that in most cases there is none, and in the cases where it has happened, the impact was never enough to actually change the overall results. These facts don’t matter, because facts have never mattered to the current administration.

Actual physical ballot tampering isn’t the real threat. The Trump propaganda machine is. The FBI recently warned of foreign governments tampering in the elections by promoting falls information, including false election results and evidence of tampering. The announcement was laughable, because any tampering by foreign parties will pale in comparison to the campaign of disinformation currently being run from the White House.

I am afraid it might be over, folks. Trump promised to shake up the government. Many of his supporters wanted him in office because they wanted to see what would happen if you threw a live grenade into the Oval Office.

Now we know.

Most human endeavors involving more than one person are built on a system of implicit and explicit rules. The implicit rules are based on the notion that people are essentially good, and most of the time will try their best and support the mission of the group. Trump has shown how easy it is for someone to get into the system and tear it apart, not by breaking the explicit rules, but by ignoring the implicit ones.

If Democrats gain power in the Senate and Biden wins the White House, we might have hope to undo some of the damage Trump has caused, and maybe actually plug some of the holes in the system he has so effectively identified. But I do not believe we have any hope unless both of those things happen.

My passport is current, and I’ve been making mental lists of what I might need to grab to make a hasty exit. How about you?