“Strongmen rewrite history to justify their abuses of power and they depend on fear to control their followers.”
But…
“He does not have unlimited power.”
“(America) -has a history of more than 250 years in which power has been systematically dispersed throughout society.”
“-so, there is (an) enormous reservoir of resistance and authority that we need to now activate-”
It all sounds good, but the white supremacists are out there…and they know this is the only chance they will EVER have to start a race war and pursue genocide. Whatever they are going to do, they are going to do it fast and try to ride this wave of fear of confusion.
I had that awful feeling Trump would win and the reason it was awful was because of a million closet nazis that just might “ignite.”
Look for signs of them organizing…of the FBI arresting large numbers of them.
It is Sunday morning….and the sadness is not overwhelming like it was Wednesday, when I woke up to the end of America. Profound confusion is more the ground I walk on now. It occurred to me after I woke up that in the weeks leading up to the election, I was building up my excitement level for after the victory. That all would be right in the world, and I could get on with my life. That victory would be the mythic starting gun signaling real progress on all the projects I was working on. With that thought I now realize how damaged the future now is. The VA called last night with good and bad news. What could end my life in a year will not this year, but the other thing that definitely will end my life, perhaps in not very many years… is progressing.
It started going bad for me on September 10th with the Polaris Dawn billionaut mission. I thought that was rock bottom…for Human Space Flight anyway. Then lying in bed with Covid I watched the chopsticks catch the shiny and called that the new rock bottom not only for Human Space Flight. Now….as I reflect on stage four of the grieving process, depression, I believe today has to be all the way down to rock bottom. Nihilism is eating away at my soul, and I feel zero hope for the future.
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It is noon and I am arguing with myself about what to do next. What is there to do? Listen to a comedian.
So… to go along with Stage Four, Al has a depressing one for a change.
This started well and relit some hope of progressing to stage five (acceptance). The first bit of knowledge leading to processing what has happened being Norm citing the main factor as Covid. Every developed country, conservative or liberal, experienced inflation from the Covid supply chain breakdown and suffered a popular backlash.
Family hardship bred the sense that the government was indifferent to the plight of the “working people”, and this led to a distrust of “elites.” Populist backlash against experts and elites goes back to the Tea Party and after Covid those intent on dividing and conquering portrayed Trump as the anti-elitist and opposite of those who seemed to have disdain and condescension for the citizenry. The price of eggs ended America.
With the exception of Jews and black women, every group moved to the right. Over half of Latino males, at least in Michigan, ignored the racist Madison Square Garden rally and voted for Trump. The media kept treating Trump like he was not what he is and only became super-critical at the very end when it was too late. The sane-washing of Trump by the media took him to victory.
So… essentially, something we knew was going to happen eventually, a pandemic, raised consumer prices and this inconvenience enabled the neoliberals to drive our consumer-programmed democracy to suicide, aided by a profit-driven “free press.”
What will happen now is preordained.
“Well, one of the ways that I fear Trump will act is -to do what Orban did in Hungary…to get states and the courts and maybe even the congress to do a set of things that will turn our elections into, you know, turn our elections into a farce – where – they’re tilted so they win no matter what.”
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.” Albert Einstein.
I bargained with my grief and came to terms with it yesterday in a small way. Part of that was figuring out why this election has affected me so much. I believe that stress actually compromised my immune system over a month ago and I went from the Flu to catching Covid to a bacterial infection in my lungs I am still taking anti-biotics for.
How I came to this state is going to be part of the bargain I have struck with my grief over American ending. To avoid Stage Five, depression, I am going to need a project.
I am going to try something within my abilities and “podcasting” looks like the best path.
Maybe this is going to go a little quicker than I thought a couple hours ago.
My wife had a talk with me and said many people are crying. I have not been able to bring myself to watch any news, but they know what I know. And now I am thinking about the two-digit IQ half of America that just destroyed it and are cheering. This takes me out of denial, which I have already processed as my brain just playing a trick on me….and on to anger.
I imagine I will be stuck on anger for quite a while. But…maybe not.
After anger, then bargaining, then depression, then acceptance.
Contemporary Views However, more recent research shows that the process of grieving may not necessarily follow a set pattern of specific reactions over time. People react to loss in different ways and grief can be messy.
-a more current interpretation of the theory is that:
“Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are some of the common reactions to loss. People may experience these emotions at any time during the grieving process and not necessarily in any particular order. Everyone may not necessarily experience all five of these emotions when grieving, as each person tends to have a unique bereavement process. Factors such as the severity of and circumstances surrounding the loss, individual differences in personality and temperament, and cultural, spiritual, and religious beliefs can play a role in the person’s grieving process.“
This is my third post today and I have a long drive ahead of me…so I will end it here for now. Bargaining seems to be next, and I will think about that. “In this stage, you may find yourself negotiating with yourself, with people around you, with fate, or with a higher power to try and mitigate or undo your loss.”
I am now entering that first stage of grief….denial.
I am fated to watch America die over the next few years. It was obvious to me in the run up to the election if we lost, we would lose everything…. irretrievably. After nearly a quarter of a millennium, the experiment is over. Several billion others around the world are wondering how this happened, but unlike Americans, they know what will happen next. Inevitably. But while we did understand what was at stake, now suddenly we do not. That does not change the fact there is no going back now.
And I am thinking, and I cannot stop myself….well, maybe this is not the end.
Denial it is.
Next comes anger, then bargaining, then depression, then acceptance.
I do not know personally how the next stage, the anger, will manifest. I am not violent but there may be some violence in society. How long will it take to go through the outrage and move on to the next and the next and finally accept what has happened?
I predict the anger will come with the first actions of the regime. Then the bargaining with my soul that it is not that bad. Then it will become clear that it really is that bad. My fear is that it will be as bad as it possibly can be, which would be the last chapter of The Turner Diaries.
Up at five after about six hours of sleep. Here we go. Not a great feeling about today. I hope it is my old ready crew thing messing with me (when I stood duty as a helicopter aircrewman I would get these bad feelings). Of course it was just my mind playing tricks on me. Bad things would happen sometimes and sometimes not. Hopefully not today.
Rejecting reality is the ultimate superpower it seems. Redefinition, repetition, projection…flooding the zone with misinformation and chaos. Only the strongman can decide and assign “truth.” What is truth?
On his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by historian Gary Gerstle:
5:56 “The Soviet Union represented an existential threat to the United States”.
6:48 “-and that required (to contain communism) a standing army and quasi-peacetime of a sort that America had never experienced before. And Taft was profoundly uncomfortable with this…he was a republican in a classical sense, small central government, devolve power to the state, it’s suspicious of foreign entanglements, believing that America was protected by the two vast oceans and thus did not need a strong standing army, did not have to be involved in world affairs, and he was opposed to The New Deal; he thought it was a form of tyranny, was going to lead to collectivism, Soviet style, and he was poised, in the 1940’s, to roll back The New Deal-“
Eisenhower came along to address communism and without the cold war The New Deal would have disappeared and been seen “as a blip” instead of a “juggernaut” that continued on for 30 more years.
17:18 “-but the scale of this would not have reached the point that it did without getting a lot of republicans on board and the critical argument for them was national security and the critical event was Sputnik-“.
6 percent of American adults support the use of force to restore Trump to the presidency.
8 percent of American adults support the use of force to prevent Trump from becoming president.
6 percent is a little over 15 million. 8 percent is a little over 20 million.
While the right is more likely to have guns, America has more guns than people and those on the left with guns, and there are many, will share if it comes to violence. Only a small percentage of a small percentage of a small percentage are going to end up shooting at each other and it will in my opinion be roughly equal and Martial Law will be declared quickly, and the military will move in and when they start shooting anyone with a gun on sight, which is the only way to stop a civil war, it will be over quickly. The military will follow the orders of their officers and the officers will obey the sitting government. Various National Guard and Reserve units might stage half-hearted mutinies but the military will react to that like the dreadful hand of God. The great worry is that the democrats are the ones who will not react strongly enough out of fear of being the fascists and if luck is on their side the Trumpists will take power.
Ice on the Moon 