covid diary: day 173

 This is exhausting. 

Every day, there's some new evil being perpetrated by this administration. Every day, roughly a thousand of my fellow Americans die and there's barely a ripple nationally. And the lies. The blame shifting. The gaslighting. Up is down and left is pink and everything takes so much EFFORT.

And that's on purpose. We're on year four of a chaos campaign designed to distract us with maximum outrage, to keep us fighting on so many fronts that we can't tell what day it is or what direction the next attack will come from. 

It didn't have to be this way. Not just in an abstract sense, but in a concrete one. It wasn't supposed to be this way. New evidence comes out every week that details things like how corrupt reporters leaked exit polls to the Trump campaign on Election Day 2016 indicating where he was going to lose, then between the phone call at 5 p.m. and the polls closing a couple hours later, miraculously JUST ENOUGH votes were cast to give Trump enough swing states to win the Electoral College. New evidence comes out all the time, including a report from the Republican Senate, that Trump did in fact collude with Russia to win the election. And he's going to do his best to do it again this year.

I'm not sure what the remedy is here. All the guardrails and checks and balances have failed, and we are in the direst of straits. Biden calls it a "battle for the soul of our nation," but I think of it more like "last chance to keep a democracy, morons."

Trump supporters talk casually about the potential for a second civil war if he doesn't win this election, but what they might not realize is that it's already been happening across the nation in a very personal way. Take me, for example. I can understand how some members of my family voted for Trump the first time, thinking he would be better than Clinton, thinking the Supreme Court was the most important thing and that checks and balances would keep Trump in line with the norms of government. What I cannot and will not ever understand is that some of those people are still Trump supporters after four years. This is what they wanted? Kids in cages, hundreds of thousands dead in a pandemic with no effective response, endless lawbreaking, graft happening before our eyes, rights being taken away from Dreamers and immigrants and citizens alike? 

No. Anyone who still supports this administration does not care about me or my family, or this nation. Certain of my family members will profess their love for us all, but continue to support an administration that would continue to gut rights and access to opportunity for my Black great-nephew, for my gay cousins, for me. And guess what? That's not love, and I want no part of it. I feel like I'm constantly grieving people I used to admire these days. I will never be able to forget that these people stood against our family and still professed their love for us. It's never "just politics."

I realize there's not much light and hope in this post, but that's because there's not much light and hope in the country right now. There are little things. My great-nephew E spent the day with us Friday. My parents brought the boys new school shoes, along with hanging baskets of pansies for me and Mike. There hasn't been a huge outbreak at our school yet, so we're thinking we will send the boys back to in-person school after fall break. There are 64 more days to get through before the election.

But in the meantime, we're tired. So, so tired.