Waiting

I’m writing a few days out from the midterms, setting down for posterity more than anything what it feels like to live in such times. The country - perhaps the world - is holding its breath, waiting for Tuesday…and the days after. Even at my work, where we’re careful to steer clear of politics generally, it’s crept into the conversation. And it’s occasionally more about the aftermath than the actual event. I saw a clip of Donald Trump attacking a reporter from Reuters after being asked a question relating to canceled campaign travel plans. He’s thin-skinned about his health; that’s been clear for a long time, so the way the reporter phrased the question, which was to ask if he was “tired” of traveling, set him off. But it was a clear tell that he was tense, and yes, tired. And it’s telling that when things don’t go his way, he unleashes. And in the rallies, he did go forward with his speech, and his behavior was more erratic than usual, which is, even the most ardent supporters would have to agree, pretty erratic. Yet apparently no one in his inner circle could talk him out of going ahead on stage, nor control his messaging. So, unfettered by anyone and anything resembling sense, he continued to talk about candidates’ physiques, spew one racist untruth after another, the plumbing at the Reflecting Pool, and in some cases just ramble about nothing. My mother had Alzheimer’s, and I’m promising you she could string together a better sentence than some of what I’ve seen clips of our President saying on the news recently. Now, was her dialogue based in reality? No, not a lot of the time, but it was at least in complete sentences. He’s really 0 for 2 on that front.

I would feel bad for him if he were almost anyone else because it’s been a brutal travel and speaking schedule, made necessary by his own party’s ineffectiveness to govern responsibly, granted, but still, it’s a toll on someone of any age, let alone 80. But as I watch this odd, unsettling behavior unfold, and knowing what we all know about the events that culminated in the storming of the Capitol, I know I’m not alone in wondering how he will react if there truly is a blue wave come Tuesday. And what does one do while one waits for the potential end of the world as we know it and/or the long-awaited beginning of the end of the Trump era?

Well, I’m not sure I know the answer to the first question. I’ve been reading what local election officials have been game-planning, which is to prepare for just about every eventuality, including bomb threats and ICE officers on site. But for voters, it’s hard to know what we’ll see and experience, and how to navigate anything out of the ordinary. But that is not where the challenge to the country really lies: it’s when the results start coming in. Those could be choppy seas. Until then, life goes on pretty much as usual, just with that ever-present knowledge that Tuesday is election day hovering over us. We go to work, we watch football or hockey (or I suppose some of you watch basketball), we walk the dog(s), we take our kids trick-or-treating. We, in short, gingerly go about our lives, tiptoeing through normality that seems somewhat fragile now. I know that I was very grateful for a home game this past Sunday. I was able to set all of this aside for a few hours and just scream my head off. Talk about cathartic. But then it struck me that, here I was, happy to have a respite from the worry and fret of a simple midterm election year. Every election has its own heft for people who are invested in politics, but never – even to a degree in 2020 – has an election had the feel of this one. There’s so much at stake. And we’re so far from the democracy we thought we had. Now we are living in a country where the administration, if its leader gets his feelings hurt, could lash out to hurt everyone else in retaliation. That’s not democracy at all.

I’ve spent the last two years making the case that we’re not the same as Nazi Germany. On the eve of this election, I worry whether I was right. And all I can do, once I vote, is wait to see what happens. I wonder if this was what Europeans felt in 1939.