Good morning, everyone. Today is the day the United States votes for the next citizen Commander in Chief.

2020 has been an amalgamation of all the forces, pressures, and stresses that resulted in Donald J. Trump winning election in 2016, on overdrive, bombarding us in an unrelenting fashion, daily.

We are worse off than we were four years ago in many important ways. This is not all Trump’s fault. It is not even necessarily mostly his fault.

But regardless of whether or not it should be this way, we currently live in a world where on any given day the President can type 280 characters and create a nation-wide frenzy, directly affecting millions of people’s mental state.

Either Trump does not care about the strong negative side effects of wielding this power, or he does not understand them, and neither of those situations are particularly good.

It is fairly obvious, even for many Trump critics at this point, that popular media, social media companies and old corporate press, have a particular bias. There are double standards employed day in and day out, with gaslighting a regular occurrence.

A depressing aspect being that it’s not even cleverly deceptive anymore.

One thing that contributes to both of these problems is the velocity at which information flows to each one of us, and how quickly we are tasked with reacting to the information.

Trump critics have put everyone on high alert from the start, filling the environment with imagery of a new holocaust.

From day one, every single thing that Trump did, even if Obama did it ‘or worse’ was treated as it if were a unique event in modern history, the only parallels found just before the rise of the Third Reich.

This behavior put people who were in the middle, critics of Trump and Obama, in a regular pattern of conversation:

you either accepted the unfounded examples of alarm and agreed to join in the hysterics, or you were ‘part of the problem.’ Fully complicit in the inevitable future holocaust. This problem grew as the threats of violence grew from those seeking to prevent this upcoming holocaust.

Trump has either intentionally played off of this scenario, or been unacceptably oblivious to it, and many things he has personally done increased this dynamic over the last four years.

His inability to speak without 78 commas and parenthesis,
dropping red meat to his critics with phrases like ‘Muslim ban’ has made defending him a full time job for his supporters, uncompensated. Even when he is in good context, people go out of their way to take him out of it.

Some positive things Trump has done would not have been done with any of the other candidates in 2016. We do not have to agree what those things are.

One positive consequence of Trump’s personality is that he is willing to go the road less travelled, despite people telling him going that route is certain doom.

New Presidents enter a system that already exists. All the agencies are staffed with people who preceded their term, and sometimes preceded the previous President.

The systems that produce intelligence and give advice to the President are rigid. The new guy is seeing the same things as the old guy. This inevitably leads towards a convergence of decisions within bounds. Except for Trump.

This Trump exception is not a free good. Some advice he ignores should probably be heeded. But because of both who Trump is and the way his detractors react, it is very difficult for us to slow down and discuss which unique decisions he’s made are wise and which are foolhardy.

Trump’s supporters are too busy drinking ‘liberal tears’ and his detractors are too busy hallucinating a Nazi dictatorship (often for their own authoritarian purposes).

I am not voting for Trump. I am not voting for Biden. I am prepared for either outcome, but I am tired.

If you voted for Trump and Trump wins, please consider not rubbing salt in the wound of your brethren across the aisle. You won. Let that be enough.

Celebrate behind the scenes with friends and maybe laugh at TYT as they melt down again – but please consider making it a private affair. And maybe reach out to an old friend who cut you out of their life in the last four years to see if they’re OK after the dust settles.

If you voted for Trump and he loses, it will be OK. Even if you believe the reason was fraud, there is no fixing that this round. Advocate for sane election changes in two years. Do not go off the deep end wasting all of your energy on one election. It does nobody any good.

If you voted for Biden, and Biden wins, you are going to want to try to get revenge. But you shouldn’t.

If you voted for Biden and he loses, breathe. Turn off the TV and go to bed. The world will still be here tomorrow, and you can be a positive part of it.

Goodspeed, everyone.