My thoughts on the past four years post-election

[CharlesPhipps]

http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogsp ... omega.html

Weirdly, I feel like singing the theme from Star Trek: Enterprise. No, seriously.

It's been a long road
Getting from there to here
It's been a long time
But my time is finally near

I will see my dream come alive at last
I will touch the sky
And they're not gonna hold me down no more
No they're not gonna change my mind
No they're not gonna hold me down

Cause I've got faith of the heart
I'm going where my heart will take me
I've got faith to believe
I can do anything
I've got strength of the soul
And no one's gonna bend or break me
I can reach any star
I've got faith
I've got faith
Faith of the heart

The election of Donald Trump was something I was not necessarily overly worried about. I voted against him after voting for Bernie then Hillary but I figured that he was mostly a gross jerkass but wouldn't be able to do much. I underestimated not just what he'd do in office but also the depths of what the man had done in the past. Mafia ties, money laundering for dictators, cheating workers, rape allegations, and other serious crimes. The media had treated Donald J. Trump as a buffoon and he should have been treated as a criminal.

It was even stranger because both my parents reversed longstanding opinions of the man in order to vote for him. I mean personal opinions of the man that just weirded me the hell out. My father had recommended against letting Donald Trump build a golf course in Lexington, Ky due to his history of cheating his partners. My mother was a friend of Marla Maples and knew of the domestic abuse as well as cruelty the man displayed to his closest family. In that way, maybe I too was suffering amnesia because I should have been scared from the beginning. Now I'm left knowing that one of the last things my father ever did while alive was voted for that man.

Donald J. Trump immediately started doing things that not only offended me from a moral standpoint but endangered the people that I cared about in my real life. My wife is disabled with fibromyalgia and needed the help of the ACA in order to make sure that she wasn't rendered destitute for treatment. Twice she's had to have serious surgery for broken legs that didn't recover remotely as well as they should have. Getting insurance for these and other preexisting conditions was impossible without government aid.

It wasn't just my wife that his hostility to the ACA threatened either as I knew other friends and loved ones who couldn't survive without it. I'd been blessed growing up with decent health care and insurance but I knew lots of other people who simply could not afford it. That was in addition to Donald's attack on the rights of trans Americans and other highly vulnerable people. The fact so many evangelicals rallied around him as he stood for nothing but attacking immigrants, Muslims, LGBT, and others made me sick. It was not the Christianity I'd been raised to believe in and seemed like a mass insanity. Yet, none of the people I knew seemed to care about anything he did until he was putting children in cages. Even then, it was often blamed on Obama who didn't have a blanket separation policy.

If you think I'm exaggerating, it gets weirder because I was there on 4chan when Qanon was created. I had mostly left that site since I was always more interested in gaming than racism but I knew when people started the internet game about "Q." For those unfamiliar with the particulars, he was a fake spy that would give puzzles like the fucking Riddler that people would decipher while indicating Donald Trump was waging a secret war against the pedophile Illuminati. It's fake, obviously, and was always meant to obviously be fake. It's about as believable as the Slenderman and every bit as obvious. Yet, increasingly, people actually came to believe in the nonsense. I'm talking about millions of people who were terrified of internet fanfiction. I recommend reading this article if you want to know how people monetized it too: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ ... on-n900531

I did my best to ignore the increasing craziness of the country but it influenced both my mental health as well as my writing. Gary in the Supervillainy Saga gradually moved from being my celebration of Spider-Man, Batman, and the Dresden Files to being something more overtly political. He became an anarchist and vent for a lot of my distaste for how the country was going. The United States of Monsters dealt strongly with the racism and poverty as well as general hostility the world seemed to feel. Even Agent G, which is about as cyborg assassin, suddenly became about corporate manipulation of the masses via scapegoats.

The issue was doubly frustrating because I live in Kentucky, where it honestly feels like any vote I make is going to be utterly worthless since it is the state of Mitch McConnell. That proved to not be the case when we kicked out Governor Bevin, a man who literally stole money from teacher's pensions and tried to exacerbate the opioid crisis for financial gain. He also pardoned a few pedophiles and murderers on the way out. Mitch McConnell obstructed every bit of legislation that came out of the Blue Wave of 2018 while also protected Trump from the consequences of his actions. I never thought Trump would be removed via impeachment but I'd hoped it would wake up people to just what a bad dude he was.

I sought refuge in media to try to help things make more sense. Really, not nearly enough of it seemed angry about what was going on. I became a fan of Trevor Noah and John Oliver. I started watching The Good Fight on CBS All Access, which was the only show that seemed furious about the things happening around us. I also enjoyed Remember Bowling Green by David Niall Wilson and Patricia Macomber. That's kind of a beautiful Discworld/Doctor Who-esque story that expressed just a bit of the frustration I was feeling. I wished it had a sequel and recommend people pick it up. You can check it out here if it intrigues you: https://www.amazon.com/Remember-Bowling ... 807&sr=8-1

The sheer bizarrity was the more depressed and uncertain I felt about my future, the more Donald's popularity seemed to go up. There were plenty of people who went from supporting Donald to thinking of him in messianic terms that confused the hell out of me. This included some people actually faking miracles (a greater blasphemy I can't think of) in order to make Donald Trump look better (if you don't believe me: https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/0 ... racle.html). All of this happened before the coronavirus pandemic too.

I actually didn't expect to hold the coronavirus pandemic against the President. After all, a plague is something you can only prepare for, not prevent. Yet, the bizarre and disturbing stories coming out of the White House shook me to the core. Insane tales of stealing supplies from Blue states for Red states, bidding wars, throwing out pandemic plans, hostility to testing, and seemingly irritated with attempts to actually fight it. I caught the coronavirus in March and suffered through it but what struck me as insane was how easy this would have been to contain with the right measures or at least reduce the worst effects of.

I never hated the people who voted for Donald. Mind you, it took reading Mary Trump's book for my mother to change her opinion on him despite voting for Obama in the previous election. However, it felt like they were living in a separate reality from the rest of us. He didn't seem dangerous to them and often seemed just quirky rather than scary. He was an exaggerated jerkass billionaire game show host and Pizza Hut guy versus the guy who used to have goons kick out people from their homes so he could tear them down like Daredevil's Kingpin (and that's the legal stuff). Not the guy who admitted, under oath, that he robbed his own children's and veteran's charities to fund his campaign. We were on two different worlds (separate ways--Journey).

The election itself was one that I was terrified about. I hadn't wanted to vote for Biden. I'd supported Elizabeth Warren, Bernie, and even Harris over Biden. Yet, you go to war with the army you had. I was hoping for a Blue Wave but it ended up being more a splash. For 70 million Americans, everything that happened wasn't a reason to kick out Donald J. Trump. I couldn't sleep or eat much during the entirety of the four days of the election. I checked for updates constantly and was terrified the Supreme Court would side with him in throwing out mail-in ballots. Yet, now, the whole thing is apparently over. Donald's allies abandoned him and this whole nightmare ends with not a bang but a whimper.

Good.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I'll take care of backup Rod Stewart voice loop at end:

I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got, I've got -- faith of the hearrrrrrrt.

da nana na, na naaaaaaaaaa

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I hear yah man.

[clearspira]

He'll be trying again in 2024. I guarantee it. You've got four years to sort your shit America.

[TGLS]

He'll be trying again in 2024. I guarantee it. You've got four years to sort your shit America.

15% chance whatever he thinks won't matter.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

It's probably in the cards that he just runs again and wins again. On that note though I doubt there's anyone who would really fill his shoes after those four more years.

[Beelzquill]

How annoying would it be for history students for trump to pull a second Grover Cleveland. No shit, I kind of want a constitutional amendment saying you only get one chance at a second term, not because I dislike Trump or anything, I didn't vote but solely so my OCD brain only has that one Grover Cleveland shaped anomoly in my who is nth president mental list.

[TGLS]

but solely so my OCD brain only has that one Grover Cleveland shaped anomoly in my who is nth president mental list.

I think I can see why you would feel this way:

http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=515

[Beelzquill]

THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED TO ME IN THIRD GRADE!!!!!

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Thanks to Die Hard 3 I know that Chester Arthur is the 21st president. I'm fairly certain that that would make Grover Cleveland the 19th and 22nd president, respectively speaking.