Holding My Breath

It's election night, USA. At nearly 7PM mountain time, results are starting to trickle in. Pundits are finding ways to keep trickling what passes in their minds for information on these results, while we, the voters, hang on the results.

I can't stand it. It's too important, and nothing anybody says now without a time machine that can see ten days in the future has any meaning whatsoever. It's all speculation, a way of keeping our eyes glued to their particular screens in hope of getting the results we need to see. It's the horse race. It's always been the horse race. After being unable to call out the lies, the cruelty, the grift, the voter suppression, the relentless crimes of all sorts over the last 4 years, it's suddenly needful for them to make up for it - as if! - by giving us their play-by-play as a last ditch effort to make themselves relevant.

As if.

300,000 mail-in ballots sit in post offices all over the country right now, despite DeJoy being ordered by a federal judge to get busy and make it a priority to find and deliver all of them on time. Lets have news about warrants being written in affected states to arrest him and all others for defying the judge's order. From a state level, a certain resident of the White House can't counter with a pardon. That's the kind of news which would give me a reason to watch election coverage tonight.

I really don't care, tonight, just which categories of voters in which areas have voted in which ways. That analysis can wait, useful for planning the next campaign, but not so much tonight.

Trump is behind his "unscalable" new barricade surrounding the White House tonight. Supposedly this will deter rioters. After seeing coverage of the sections being put in place, I had two questions. It's pretty easily put together. Isn't the converse true? And even if not, has everybody forgotten about ladders? OK, let's make that three questions: what rioters? Businesses are setting plywood barricades around their properties with expectations of looting. Already? Before any real results are known? If patterns follow this summer, it will be Trump's minions doing the looting, and with months of his encouragement behind them. "Stand back and stand by" simply asks them to wait a bit, not cease and desist.

This is not the America I grew up in. This is not the America I want to see. Previous elections have been easy to watch, results more trusted, and whatever voter suppression there was remained fairly well hidden. Politicians worked with each other, compromising and becoming friends. Now it's war, and the country, our democracy is at stake. 

I just can't watch yet.