Civil War
In a law-based civil society you rely on the courts to weigh the evidence, and you agree to abide by the court's decision. If you're going to go around saying it's a "rigged" election go ahead and show how somebody cheated in one or more of the fifty states that as far as I can tell voted clearly and decisively by a margin of some seven million. And be specific - were Senate and House elections rigged too? Are you telling me that these seven million were not real people and that in fact everyone really loved Trump?
From our perspective (I, who have hated Trump from the beginning), there were very few people who held illusions about him. He lost the popular vote the first time around. He's allowed three hundred thousand to die, writing them off as "virtually nobody," not doing anything to prevent it, without saying a word about it most of the time. He even stepped up executions on his way out, just to be sure he got a few more. His response to a melting Arctic is to sell more of it and keep the money. He'll even take money in return for granting pardons (though I can't prove this), as as far as I can tell his presidency has been on sale from the start (remember that Chinese media company that suddenly got a pass, relieved of suffering justice?). This has been going on for four long years and we're ready to say, good riddance.
The Republican Party has evolved to the point that it is mostly centered on hating the Democrats. Being conservative about money, being upright and invested in the democratic process, all this is gone. If there is division it is between people who feel we should follow laws and people who feel that hating Democrats is important enough to simply drop out of the union or fight a civil war. If this were to happen, Texas would no doubt be the leader of this new Confederacy. But it would be saddled with the states that are the biggest drains on the national economy - and the strongest supporters of Trump.
His legacy is to divide us so deeply that we talk about this. In twenty states they actually believe the election was "rigged" because to them, whatever their source of news, that's the only way he could have lost. To me, I could never see how anyone could vote for a pedophile to begin with. A guy who could rape a 13 year old and then pay to cover it up (I'm not sure he killed Epstein, but he surely had a better reason than anyone else), would have no qualms about anything else he could do to innocent people in his home country. And he's wreaked havoc, for sure.
Blowing Off the Covid
I don't tell everyone this, but I'm still an employee (part time) of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, as a writing lab tutor. We moved from Lubbock four years ago, and I'm grateful, though I still love the place. Texas Tech has become the model of the conservative approach to COVID.
That is, they go on living life as if it wasn't around. Thirty-five thousand (?) students come back to campus and are asked to wear masks, and maybe some do. Most go around spreading the virus as kids will do. Enforcement of any distancing or masks is half-hearted. Now I'm not totally sure of this, because as I've said, I've left town. But I know that Lubbock is swamped, the hospitals are full, and it's out of control.
One aspect of it is that Lubbock has a winter, unlike most of Texas. The wind blows, and it gets cold, and it actually snows sometimes, and people go indoors a lot.
One friend of mine has a partner who had a fall and had internal bleeding, but it took her a few hours to get a room. They know what to do with her - Lubbock has good hospitals - but they had no space. My friend was furious. The hospital is full of people who ignored the COVID.
The other friend actually got the COVID. He works in the President's office, which makes it kind of like the COVID ravaging the White House. If one person got it, in an atmosphere where people don't wear masks, or tend to spread it, there you go. Of course I have no idea if he got it there. He's also in contact with all the sports teams - he's a kind of pr guy - so he gets around quite a bit. You would think the university would circle its wagons, so to speak, take care of its own, shut down, or at least limit movement and activity. Well it did, a little, some would argue - as they had a social distancing football season (whereas some schools had no football season at all). Well as I've said, I don't really know how they're handling it.
But the St. John's basketball team was due to come to Texas to play a game, and just canceled it out. Too risky. Here they are, coming from urban Philly, or some such place, and Texas just seems to be too rife with the disease. You reach a point where you don't want to do
anything risky, and basketball and driving are included here, because there are no hospital beds. You get hurt, you sit in a hallway with infected people who can't get a room. Better to just stay home and lay low.
I think about this partly because I've moved to the high mountains of New Mexico, where we have about a person per acre, and lots of fresh air and sunshine. We have inconvenience - if we
do have to go to a hospital, it's about an hour away, and it's just as full as Lubbock's. But we can step out our front door, breathe the fresh air, and be sure that the deer and elk didn't bring it to us from across the valley. Our biggest problem is getting our kids to school.
Because we aren't blowing off the COVID.
