(Originally posted on Facebook)

It’s 1:49 AM California time. I’ve tried drowning my sorrows but like our electorate the booze has failed. I’m sober and I’m sad. When much earlier tonight before they went happily to bed my kids asked what would happen to us if Trump wins. I told them “nothing. We’ll keep on living like we do.” I really want to believe that. 

I want to believe that we will survive this just like the Bush years and their endless stream of dumb ideas and disastrous wars in the service of self-enrichment and some deluded concept of world order. That our democracy is strong enough to survive the selfishness of the misinformed and the self-deluded who decide that some nebulous concepts like “change” and “strength” are more important than things like decency and civility and treating one another with the respect with which we want to be treated. That we can survive those that care more about what they think are their rights than what they know are their responsibilities. That this will be a weird hiccup on our progress towards true equality and the path of righteousness we could and should take on our long walk away from the sins of our forefathers.  

But shit, man, I don’t know. I think even if the republicans come to their senses and realize that the chicken they have created with decades of enticing underprivileged socially conservative people to vote against their own self interest through fearmongering and dog-whistle (and sometimes straight up blatant) racism and bigotry and gerrymandering and voter suppression has come home to roost and do their best to rein him in we won’t be able to stop the ugliness and violence that trump’s thoughtless rhetoric will unleash on the streets of our nation.  

I fear that the allies with which we, with many hiccups and false starts along the way, have joined with to built the safest, healthiest, wealthiest world in human history will turn away from us as unworthy of our position as primus inter pares, and that we will descend into the paranoid racist fantasia that is apparently the sum total of this bigoted, ignorant, and above all hateful man’s worldview.  

The most recent immigrant in my family tree came to this country over 200 years ago.  I have ancestors and family members who have, cumulatively, served in our nation’s armed forces for at least 100 years. I am an American and I love my country. And I have hope we will get though this and find some way to come back together and all be neighbors again. But right now, the fear is fighting the hope and sleep seems a million miles away. Because I’m thinking about what I’m supposed to say to my kids when they wake up tomorrow and I have to tell them what our fellow Americans have decided is in their best interests, but that it’s all going to be OK. And I just don’t know if that’s not a lie.