Soapbox

The Basement Letters

Oh baby, hold me tight~
I can’t take the news tonight.

It’s terrifying to think how many Americans went out and risked their health to cast their vote to drive the car off the cliff.
I got home from the polls a little before 9:00. I took a long shower to try to scrub the 450+ people we processed at my precinct off my skin and went down to the basement, where I plan to basically stay for the next 10 days until I know I haven’t contracted Covid.
It was my intent to curl up and sleep and not look at any news results until tomorrow. After all, there were no longer and letters I could write, phone calls to make or donations to send that could influence what was happening. However what little sleep I got was filled with people making cryptic remarks that were intended to offer me clues as to what the results were but told me nothing, so a little after 1 AM, frustrated and exhausted and wide awake, I picked up my phone and swiped to the news page.

And now my hands are shaking.

The election has not been called yet, which in a way is a crushing defeat, given how far ahead Biden was in most polls. But even if he pulls it out when absentee ballots are counted, the “Blue Wave” did not happen. The whole middle of the country is solid red. Texas looked pretty blue when I got home but it’s now red, as is Ohio.
WTF Ohio??

How could that many people vote for death? What the hell does that madman have to do to convince you that he’s- well, a madman? Because if anything is clear, it’s that many, many people are going to die as a result of a Trump second term. So many people worked so hard to keep it from happening, but clearly, as many also worked to destroy American democracy, civil rights, human rights and lives.
Donald Trump’s Covid-19 policy has been “Ignore It” and a quarter-million of us have paid the price. And his response to that has been to simply shout that “We’ve rounded the corner” Covid has been eliminated, doctors are lying, there will be a vaccine any day— come to my rally and DIE FOR ME.

And people did. Every single day we got more news that proved that his campaign rallies were literally killing people… and still they came.
And, apparently, they voted.

4 years ago, when it became clear that Clinton was going to lose to Trump, Steve came to me and put his arms around me and after a minute whispered, “I’m scared”. And I was too. I knew it would be bad, but it was so so much worse than I had feared. I had hoped it would be George W Bush-level bad, but was far worse. (Hell, George Bush is against Donald Trump!)
And unless a miracle happens, it is going to get exponentially worse still.

Trump’s hideous Supreme Court majority is going to vote to end the Affordable Care Act… in the middle of a pandemic. When the Republicans, after a decade, still have *nothing* with which to replace it. Millions will lose health care coverage and be unable to afford hospital treatment for Covid that might save their lives.
If there still are hospital beds available to be treated in, which there already are not in some areas that have resorted to make-shift field hospitals in fairground buildings.

The Trump Thugs: armed bands of MAGA red-hat wearers ranging from mere entitled idiots to violent white-supremacists plotting serious domestic terrorism, will feel empowered as never before to harass and attack minorities- oh, and their own governors if they dare have the temerity to institute public freaking health policies to limit the spread of a killer disease.
Because they want to go back to drinking beer in bars and how dare anyone tell them not to?
The Brownshirts of Hitler’s Germany have become the Red-hats of America.

And the utterly sociopathic Republican congress who as a body stood back and watched as their own constituents suffer and die, have already violated every principle they ever claimed to have held. Collude with Russia as they hack the US election systems and even our power grid?
Sure. Whatever.
Call our military “losers” and “suckers” while simultaneously using them as props and photo ops?
Ho hum.
Lock children in cages- including 500 kids, some just toddlers, separated from their immigrant parents never to be returned because DHS didn’t bother to keep a record of whose children they were?
They’re not our kids, so…
Grift hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars by playing golf almost weekly at your own golf clubs, overbilling the Secret Service and others for the rooms they must book, golf carts they must use, etc just to take care of you?
Well at least he’s not Obama in a tan suit.

God almighty. I can’t even keep writing the crimes against justice, the Constitution, and the People which  Republicans have aided and abetted Trump in committing. There is literal blood on their hands but, thanks to a bunch of dark money donors, it looks like even the worst of them will keep their senate seats.

And looming over it all is Covid. A disease we COULD be managing, but we’re not. Because freedom matters more than lives to the pro-life party.

Things Donald Trump has blamed ~So far~ for the ridiculous infection and death rate in America:
* Masks. Wearing masks doesn’t help. No, it actually makes it worse. Only democrat America haters wear masks.
* Testing. We don’t have skyrocketing infection rates- we just have the best testing in the world! If we didn’t test so many people, we wouldn’t have so many cases. He actually said that.
* Nurses. It wasn’t that his federal task force (headed by Jared Kushner) totally failed to ramp up national production of PPE’s (personal protective equipment) despite knowing we would need them. No no, he hadn’t diverted shipments away from hospitals (particularly in states with Democratic governors) and even sold them overseas. No. The reason hospitals and nursing homes had to dress staff in frickin’ garbage bags because they had no gowns and re-use gloves is that nurses were stealing the supplies and selling them. (Because you know nurses: always in it for the big bucks)
* Military families. The reason Covid blew through the White House like a tornado and he got infected himself wasn’t his terrible policy of not wearing masks and having large group events. It was military and their families and police officers who insisted on hugging and kissing him because they just love him so much.
* The Wind. Wind blows Covid around and that, not the lack of masks, infected people.
* The Media. Turns out we don’t have escalating infection and a quarter-million people dead- it’s just that the lying Fake News media keeps talk-talk-talking about Covid and making us think we do.
* Doctors. Because blaming nurses wasn’t repugnant enough, now Trump says the high death rate is just doctors ~saying~ that people who died of something else actually died from Covid FOR MONEY. Because doctors get paid more for Covid patients, see? So if  you die from emphysema but you also happen to get Covid, those unethical, money-grubbing doctors (who have been risking their own lives daily for almost a year now treating Covid patients) are putting “Covid-19” as the cause of death when it wasn’t. See?

Who are you going to believe: every doctor and virologist and public health expert on the planet… or Donald J Trump, con-artist, grifter of tax money, who steals from charities and puts babies in cages?

And by the 10’s of millions… people chose to believe him. Even as they watch friends and co-workers and family members sicken, they believe him.

It’s after 3 AM now and whatever purging I hoped writing would help accomplish has not happened. I’m exhausted, and heart-sick, and flat-out terrified. I could pick up my phone and see if anything has changed in the past 2 hours but I’m not going to sleep either way. The not-knowing isn’t enough better than the knowing to let me sleep.

Did anybody have the same dream as I?
Did anybody have the same dream last night?