Still waiting

 I was so hoping for a tsunami of blue today, but it didn't happen. Apparently, we can have a president who says about KKK members that "some are good people", and half the electorate in the United States will still vote for him. I don't know what their values are, if you support a terrorist, white-supremacist organization like the KKK, via your support for someone who defends them, you are not truly a part of this country, and you share none of the idealism of what it means to be American.

After having gone to bed early last night without watching even a second of election coverage, something that would have been too excruciating for me, I managed to sleep fitfully. I would wake up from time to time and go urinate, that has been my ritual for the past three decades, and the thought would return to me that the votes were being counted, and all I wanted to do was wipe to wipe the thought completely from my head and go back to sleep. Thankfully, I managed that, and sleep longer than I usually do. Sometimes I sleep six hours, if I am lucky, seven hours, but I slept last night for 9 hours, because I was afraid to wake up and hear bad news.

It wasn't bad.

I woke up and started scanning photos from events I have attended during the last few decades. It kept my mind occupied. I refused to open my browser until 8:30 a.m., and I went to the Washington Post. Biden was in the lead, but the race had not been called yet. It looks like he will win, he is gaining states and he is just a short distance away from the finish line as I write. The votes in either Arizona or Nevada will take him there, and the Trump camp is mounting a desperate campaign to freeze vote-counting and to mount recalls. But it is a fait accompli. It is a bid relief, we were saved.

What is not so positive is that the Democrats appear not to have picked up the Senate, and Dirty Mitch (as we call the Senate leader Mitch McConnell) looks to have been reelected. So he will obstruct everything Biden will do, at least until the Democrats can regain the Senate. To be fair, it didn't look as if the Democrats had a chance in that body, it always comes down to the fact that Republicans are entrenched in so many states, and no matter what the dangerous, incompetent, malicious, ignorant or capricious the Republicans are, they are white men, and white men will support other white men. I hate to put it that way, but that is what I have observed. Democrats will buck their party and vote for Republicans from time to time, they are called "Blue Dog" Democrats, but Republicans will never vote for Democrats. They are stuck in their ways.

But I am at least partially relieved. It will still be a battle, I know, they will try to mount a campaign to overturn the election or to annul votes, but it will not succeed. The important thing was to get Trump out of there, and then, to start healing. It looks as if we on headed in that direction.

As I was walking in my regular exercise routine, I noticed how busy the streets were. Yesterday, it was like Christmas, there was no traffic as I walked. It was so peaceful, and I stated that in the cellphone videos I was taping. But today, it was very different, the big rigs were much in evidence, and also, the trucks, the cars, etc. It was very busy, and it made me think, people must have taken the day off yesterday expecting the worse. We were so on edge about potential riots, and yet, now, it seems over. We can move on, and get back to the daily routing of living, or dying, as it happens, because the daily number of Covid deaths is climbing above 1,000 a day in the last few days. According to Worldmeters, the site I consult because the John Hopkins site is unreadable, they noted 1,201 deaths today, November 4th, and 1,187 deaths on November 3rd. How could anyone vote for Trump with the way he has misled us during this pandemic, calling it a Democratic hoax at the beginning? These Trump voters must really believe in white supremacy if they feel that they can vote for a person who actively endangers them. Freedom? Yes, he stands for freedom, the freedom to die.

So we will hopefully move forward now. I feel better, and I so desperately want to see a change in this country. We cannot continue down the path of wanton destruction and division, of scapegoating, of corporate greed and corruption, we have to get beyond this. I think we will, because, yes, America has committed some egregious acts, practicing slavery, engaging in genocide, suppressing worker rights, attacking the vulnerable, engaging in mass deportations of Mexicans, infecting African Americans with syphilis, grabbing territory, yes, sending marines to support dictators in Central America, all of that, but out of that suffering we also came to believe in an ideal of fashioning ourselves as a leader that welcomed the outcasts, as in the Emma Lazarus poem. From many one, and we could remake ourselves and live the American dream of social progress. It sounds corny to some, I know, but I knew many people like that, with an earnest belief in democracy, people who reached out to try to improve lives, to welcome refugees, to help them resettle, and to believe that there was a place for them. I want to return to that. I want that ideal to live once again.

We are on the way.