It's Time to Go

I can't get anything done, but I have not had the wherewithal to compose my thoughts about the election.  It has been a potpourri of antagonistic, celebratory, and recalcitrant feeling.  For a brief fleeting moment I was ecstatic about the election of Joe Biden for President.  Still I am, but as everyone is witnessing the refusal of Donald Trump and the Republican Party to recognize and concede defeat is agonizing.  Colbert would say when you wrestle with a pig your clothes get dirty and the pig likes it.  This is exactly what is transpiring.  My elation was cut short immediately by the realization that I am living in a starkly red state.  In fact both of the Carolinas are red states, and Lindsey Graham, a bone fide lair and hypocrite, was re-elected.  Emotionally I am drained, and to understand that the fight will continue was too much.  I turned it off until now.  The American South continued to wage the Civil War decades after it was declared over by the Emancipation Proclamation.  Although Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves, our American South, not the "New" South continued to lynch freed slaves until the middle of the twentieth century.  That is a bit of a misnomer.  Slavery was eradicated, and yet a rebellious and separatist American South belied the national mandate and continued to persecute African-Americans.  This aberrant and criminal behavior necessitated the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's.  While the persecution of any racial or ethnic group by another is unchristian and evil, perhaps its severity was mitigated by it resulting cultural expressions.  A strong, dominant, and long lasting movement resulted and created meaningful and influential artistic expression in American culture.  Both film and music were vehicles for this protest, and an important messages was broadcast to all of America.  The election of Joe Biden is the cusp of a new and similar expression, and it will require and demand the same amount of artistic passion mustered by its original purveyors.  Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Black Panthers, not to mention Louis Farrakhan, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and others forged the foundations of race equality in a sharply divided United States of America.  Some of this division had been quashed, but the election of Donald Trump necessarily targeted this bigotry and used it to its favor.  The work still is to be done, but we are on the right path.  My elation with Joe's election was truncated, because the tangible sentiment in the air in America today is not joy.  It is trepidation at a still impending pandemic killer.  It is the loss of millions of jobs and income.  It is the postponement of American life as we have known it our entire lives.  For the first time in our generation Communism has reared its ugly head.  It was instigated by Donald Trump.  When I take the time to reflect on the joyous news that America rallied and defeated this harrowing bully, dictator, murderer, and thief, I can feel happiness.  It is a strange fruit complicated by the recurring image of a dead Negro hanging from a noose in a tree.  I am not quick to embrace this feeling, because 2020 has been a torment of mockery of American freedom and happiness.  Knowing that I am surrounded by a majority of Trump supporters is a cold slap in the face.  If they had their way, American democracy would have failed in the greatest upset of modern times.  The pinnacle of political and governmental success publicly would have burned to rubble.  Knowing that my back is not watched or had is not new.  I have known we are on our own for a long time.  What it is is infuriating that a red wave of ignorance, culpability, and irresponsibility threatened the free world.  I guess it was inevitable, because freedom, especially American freedom, the most cherished and envied freedom worldwide, always will be tested.  It is a small miracle it survived.  As for our current President's ill behavior, and his patronage by an equally as corrupt Attorney General, my feeling is this.  This grifter and his televangelical family has been sponging off of the American people for long enough.  They did it before Donald Trump was elected president, learning and taking advantage of the American tax code and its inherent weaknesses designed for such advantage.  Honesty and integrity no longer are prerequisites for success in capitalist America.  Instead with the purposeful eradication of God and Christianity as tenants of American life, evil has proliferated.  I am angry at Donald Trump, and it is time for him to get his family out of our White House.  They no longer are welcome, because their free ride is over.  America has chosen their new leader and first family.  Without expressing what I truly feel and at its true amplification, Trump should concede defeat.  It is time for the lowly band of drifters to move on.