Monsters

"It was written... I should always be loyal

 to the nightmare of my choice."

~Joseph Conrad

Heart Of Darkness 

 

We are living in strange days. A presidential election in America had become something that I had never seen in my lifetime. A deeply divisive, dark Shakespearean play of dirty tricks and lies which led to Donald Trump's celebrated but unlikely win, and in less than a week, he will take the oath of office and become the next president. Since the election, two months ago, things have gone from depressing, to downright scary. In November, when the unlikely happened, I began to grieve. Hillary had lost to a man who promised everything to his supporters, with no details how it would be accomplished. Hillary had not promised everything, but did give a lot of details about what she knew she could change for the better. It all should have been a no-brainer for American voters. Experience. Concrete plans. Wisdom. Instead America had decided to go with Donald Trump, all because he promised to "shake things up" in Washington D.C. and beyond, and had brought the right tone of hatred to feed his supporters the red meat they craved so much.

But make no mistake... Donald Trump's win came by way of the Electoral Collage. He didn't win the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, but we have to stand by the voting system in place, so while most American's, who bothered to vote wanted Clinton, what we are apparently stuck with is Trump. Or are we? Things surrounding Trump has taken a strange turn. So strange that life right now feels like all of us are minor characters in a spy novel. We have an actual MI6 spy, Christopher Steele. We have a covert dossier on Trump, complete with salacious details, can you say... "golden showers?" We have international intrigue. And finally we have a bigger than life villain, bigger than Trump himself, Vladimir Putin. 

Trump will take the oath of office on January 20th. It's my fear that we are living in the last week of any kind of normal for quite a while, if ever again. It's my fear that when Trump takes the oath, our country will become something completely different than the free land I grew up in. Something spooky. Something less free. Something strange and lost. I feel this way because of the revelations that have come out this past week, contained in the information discovered by Christopher Steele while he was performing opposition research for one of the candidates running against Trump in the republican primaries.

There is something much worse than "golden showers" in that dossier. Something dark and unnatural. Something that apparently spooked the former spy to the point that he decided that it needed to be seen by the FBI. That implies a crime... a serious one. We all know right now that American's can no longer trust the FBI, at least the FBI under the leadership of James Comey. That fact was made perfectly clear Friday evening by democrats, upon leaving a closed door meeting with Comey on Capitol Hill. 

As Americans we all should have the right to know what shook everyone up so much. But you can't unlearn a fact, once it's in the open. When Trump's Access Hollywood tape came out, and I listened to his stupid voice bragging to Billy Bush about grabbing women's genitals, I actually tensed up so much I hurt my back and neck. It was like no other pain I have every experienced in my life. And to this day, it hurts every single time I think about what Trump said on that tape. Once it was played, once I heard it, there was no going back. Life changed.

Life is about to change again when Trump takes office. And it will change yet again when the investigation into the Russian influence on our democracy is all said and done. We won't be able to un-ring that bell. It will be horrific. It will be devastating. And it will change America forever. It will always be a part of our history, and it will probably change our path forward. And we won't be able to not know it. The America I find myself in now, is not the America I grew up in. On it's own that is normal. It's expected. But when I was a child, someone as unprepared as Donald Trump is on the surface, would never have gotten this far, but then when I was a child there was no such thing as "fake news." Or "reality TV." And Donald Trump wasn't even on the map. One thing that hasn't changed since I was a child. Monsters. And the evil deeds they do.

Will America recover, when all is said and done? 

Shrug.

I wish I knew.

Rachel Maddow said last night on her show that

 "knowing is better than not knowing."

 I hope she's right. 

 Mood: Quiet

~Me