This is a depressing day. It’s the day when crystal balls are shattered. It’s the day I expected to happen, but now it’s upon us.
There comes a time in every campaign where you really don’t know what’s going on.
Both sides are spinning small events as big deals. Everyone is talking past one another. Everything is up in the air.
This is October, and it’s the same in America every two years, as people choose what direction they want their states and nation to go in.
But it’s worse this time.
That’s because, in addition to the usual midterm madness, we’re at the center of a global crisis. Russia is seriously threatening nuclear war over its losses in Ukraine. Iranian women are rising and being crushed underfoot. In China, Xi Jinping may become a new Putin, an absolute dictator with no guardrails. Religious dictatorship is rising against democracy in India. We don’t know what’s happening in Brazil. The Sauds are pushing up oil prices.
This is also no normal midterm election. This is an existential battle between democracy and fascism. Major media try to both sides it, but that’s increasingly impossible. Every possible -ism is rising against democratic compromise and common sense – sexism, racism, fascism, Christianism. All the evils bedeviling the rest of the world have come here to roost because Vladimir Putin invited them in.
That’s why Ukraine is at the center of it all. Putin has been at war with the West, with freedom, with liberty, with democracy, with the idea of a popular will that can think for itself, ever since he came to power a generation ago. We just let it slide for two decades. This is his moment but, thanks to the American people rejecting Trump in 2020, it’s all going pear-shaped. And we don’t know what he will do in response.
Will he press “the button?” Will the Fail Safe that held for 75 years still hold? Will he destroy all of humanity at a stroke? Will those around him put him out of our misery?
We don’t know.
I do know that, around the world, compromise is no longer possible. This world cannot continue half slave and half free. It will be all one thing or all the other.
Something’s going to break. Something’s going to break big. We don’t know what it is, or exactly when it will happen. But we know it must. We feel the way our forefathers felt in 1944, and in 1864. We hold our breath and continue yelling past one another.
