We were waiting for elation. A friend told me that when Biden’s election was confirmed, a neighbor trotted over with a bottle of champagne. As they popped the cork, my friend’s mail carrier arrived and said, “Did I hear a champagne cork?” So she too was invited in for a celebration.
It was a pleasant trip to the state of normalcy, a normalcy in which the awful aberration that has been our past went pfft. But for me it wasn’t quite elation. It wasn’t flat, for sure, but it did not effervesce.
I felt an immense sense of complex relief.
Not only did the election blow away that putrid cloud we’ve been living under for the past four years, it relieved me of any interest in Trump. (Who was that putrid cloud.) Trump is now past tense. Trump was, and I have no interest in his current shenanigans, his tweets, his family, his attacks on the country, no interest in anything Trump.
As the election numbers grew, my furious bewilderment at why anybody had still voted for Trump did punctuate my peace of mind. Trump himself had shrunken in a way only comparable to something in a fairy tale. Automatically, I think of Rumpelstiltskin. Didn’t he stomp on the floor in a raging screaming fury and then…he disappeared?
But his voters didn’t, leaving the majority of us voters with the same damn question we had four years ago: why would anybody vote for Trump? Does this dimwitted voting mass suggest any genuine political statement or just mindless obeisance to the commands of their Dear Leader?
I dunno. I want to believe they will go poof as the ‘toon-god they worship goes poof. I don’t think they will but I don’t think they’ll coalesce as a mindless voting bloc again without another, similar cartoon dictator to adore and follow.
So now I wait for the restoration of rational, real governance. What happens will not be perfect but it’ll be improvement to the nth power.