Just thought: What now?
The 2016 election has hit a great deal of people very hard. Hard enough to cause all sorts of distress—both physical and mental. My ultimate concern is the underbelly of society that’s been swirled up from the bottom of the American petri dish. The backbone of this great experiment in democracy was built during the height of the Peculiar Institution. The remnants of that and the baser aspects of a toxic, male-dominated, European-sourced culture continue to ripple today. It seems that about twenty-five percent of the U.S. population is okay with a candidate who has no clue about what he brings in his wake. I care. I care because if the shit hits the fan, it's not them the racists and bigots are going to target. It's me. It's my family and some of my friends.
Ripples only last so long, however, so my immediate concerns are mitigated by time. My penultimate concern is this:
- Voting Eligible Population Ballots: 131,741,500 (56.8 percent)
- Voter Eligible Population That Didn’t Vote: 99,815,122 (43.2 percent)
- Voter Eligible Population Total: 231,556,622
I know democracy is messy, that it’s messy by design, that it forces various people to engage in many different ways often. But it’s not supposed to be this messy, where roughly half the population is deciding who goes into the highest office in the land. And the numbers are just as bad the further down the chain you go. It’s pathetic. It’s apathetic. It makes America—again, the great experiment of a nation—look like total losers compared to other democratic nations. The rest of the voting world is running voter turnout numbers in percentages of eighties and higher. We suck. Which is total bullshit. We really are a garbage heap fire of our own making, no one forced this on us.
And it has to stop.
Which brings me to ‘what now?’ And here’s my answer, this is what I’m going to do: the same damn things I’ve been doing for most of my life, from the twentieth century into the twenty-first.
Write.
Draw.
Design.
Read.
Love.
Vote.