A Daunting Trod

There have got to be a lot of people fretting the same fret.  This shit is nerve wracking.  I feel like I’m on a spacecraft and the vital signs of life support are trending rapidly towards suffocation.  Key indices are increasingly veering off in the wrong direction.  If it continues this way, past November 4th, the craft will be unable to right itself. 

What’s to make of these polls that show the race is narrowing?  What’s to make of the nation numb to the garden hose venal mendacity, flooding our yard?   It is painful to look at the news, because I know what I’m doing.  I’m consciously making light of bad news and culling feverishly for good news.  It was pretty clear Trump was going to loose mightily a month ago.  Now it’s tighter.  Now what will happen is not so clear.

It’s unthinkable to imagine that buffoon with a mandate to rule anything more than his property.  I’ve quipped that I’ll move to China.  But in fact I’m considering moving home and I’d be lying if I said this didn’t give me pause. It gives my children pause. Deplorables, pneumonia, Matt Lauer . . . the news keeps getting served up sour.  We’ve got seven days till the first debate.  Will that change the tone?  Will that initiate something worse?  I feel like a small child, infantilized by this “news” cycle that trump plays so effectively with non-news announcements.  I’m desperate for ‘good’ news.  How ridiculous.

HRC will win the election.  Trump will lose.  This is something I have faith in.  And the country will survive DJT even if I’m wrong. I suppose my faith in that truth is even deeper.  And it will survive HRC if my intuition is correct, as well.  I have faith that her strengths will overwhelm her compromises.  But all this faith-based prognosticating is very tiring and forces uncomfortable questions about why you bother to invest faith in anything at all.  The rule of law?  Retirement?  Progress?  It’s a daunting trod to consider without the steel rails.

But this is the good part of American democracy, such as it is.  This unease should be what motivates people and sharpens arguments, forces affinities.  The fact that we don’t know; that multiple outcomes are possible puts the onus on each person to take some responsibility for the narrative.  Woody Allen once mused his goal was to capture a small fraction of the gripping drama of the last few minutes of a close basketball game, to render that level of immediacy into his screenplays.  The United States does a good job, perhaps an increasingly good job, of bottling some of that, revitalizing interest as it always does, in the fourth quarter, the closer we draw to the agreed upon end point.