After TFG was defeated in 2020 I thought, Finally we'll be rid of that toxic lunatic and things will get back to normal again. But then there was all that election fraud nonsense and crazy Rudy saying mad things in the parking lot of a landscape company and 60+ lawsuits and 1/6, and pretty soon it looked like TFG was going to be the political equivalent of long covid - you survived and sort of recovered but the unpleasant after-effects just won't go away and you don't know when they will, if ever.

So we hope for the best but expect the worst, and the outcome probably will be something in-between and in varying degrees of awful, depending on where you live. We'll have to carry on but we won't know for awhile what the final picture will be - probably not Nazi Germany but maybe some kind of "soft" fascism or something like The Troubles of Northern Ireland, or maybe just protracted struggles in the courts. The best case scenario is that Biden vetos everything coming out of a GOP-dominated Congress, but even that is just a stalemate. And what might happen in 2024 is anybody's guess. It's the uncertainty and the sense that something really bad could happen that makes me feel like the character in the Li'l Abner cartoon with the storm cloud over his head. I'm old but given my ancestors' tendency toward longevity I could be around for another 20 years or so, and right now I'm just hoping those last years don't suck too much.