The Temptation To Say "It's Over"

 When I say, "we won," I say it with the expectation that I don't have a whole heck of a lot of conservative followers anymore so...

"We won."

I imagine many of you are wondering why that's not all in caps or with a butt-ton of exclamation points or whatever, but I feel the simple period says it best. That's probably because the natural extension of that thought right now is, "It's over."

"We won. It's over."

Except that it's not. Over, that is. It's really just beginning. Which is... exhausting. Because it's been an incredible battle to get to where we are right now at this moment, and where we are is that roughly 20% of the country turned out to vote for a racist fascist with the hopes of keeping him in power. And, possibly as bad as that, around 1/3 of the country couldn't be bothered to show up to vote one way or the other.

Let's see... "Hey, there's a wannabe dictator running for President of your country, would you like to go vote for the other guy?" "Nah, I can't be bothered with that."

Which is to say that more than half of the citizens of the United States are, minimally, perfectly fine with the downfall of democracy in the US.

Anyway...

What we have to look forward to, now, is that over the next couple of months Trump (#formerfakepresident) will be out trying to whip his drones into a frenzy about how the election was stolen from him with the hopes that they will do something, anything, to keep him in power. I guess we'll see how that plays out. Violence is my guess, but I hope I'm wrong.

And that's not even the real fight.
The real fight is that Darth Mitch still holds the Senate in his purple-inflamed fist and is already vowing to, well, keep doing what he's been doing, blocking everything that doesn't support his agenda to subvert the judicial system into a racist conservative perversion that only supports rich white people. The real fight is in, initially, trying to repair all of the damage done by the petulant toddler who's been inhabiting the White House for the last four years.

The really real fight is going to be trying to restore the environment and people still, largely, are not being aware of how critical this is and that, in many ways, maybe most ways, the damage has been done and can't be fixed; all we can do is try to lessen the effects of what's coming.
--For fuck's sake people, an iceberg the size of the state of Delaware has just decided to begin roaming the Atlantic and is expected to bring catastrophe to an environmentally-important species-diverse island.

So, while it would be great to sit back and relax and hold onto the thought of "it's over" as if it's a steaming cup of coffee on a chill morning and it feels oh-so-good on your cold fingers, it's not time for that yet. The real fight is still ahead. The fight to get Biden into office was the fight to get us into the real fight. The fight for the environment. The fight against the racist assholes who support #fakepresident. The fight to reform the criminal justice system into something that's fair for everyone, not just those who are white and/or rich. The fight against ignorance, stupidity, and intolerance.

The fight against "christianity" and the destructive forces of religion in our country. But more on that later.

I guess what I'm saying is this:
Take a breath if you need to. Go dance in the streets some more and ring some more bells (thank you Paris and Berlin, in particular). Be happy in this victory.
But do not think "It's over; we won," because this was just a skirmish, and, really, we barely won it, this which really should have been a no-brainer of a victory. Taking the Senate should have been an easy job, and we're still waiting to see what happens there. We lost seats in the House for no good reason other than the fact that Democrats are horrible at down-ballot voting. Democrats and liberals are not fully invested in what's going on; Republicans and conservatives are. They are bringing this fight as hard as they can and have been doing so for decades.

So dig in. It's not over.