52-56 million Republicans. That's how many Republicans seem currently convinced that the election outcome is a lie. When you come down to it, it's not quite as big a number as it seems. It's only 1/6th of the country's population, and let's face it: it's densely concentrated in the older half, the fatter half, the sicker half, the coddled half, and the dumber half. But it's obviously a sixth that cares very, very much, perhaps the sixth that cares by far the most....
Now, let's just assume that due to peer pressure, somewhere around one-third of these 'truthers' are, to varying degrees, lying... that still means half of Republican voters - perhaps 35 million adults - believe with whatever organ they think their brain is that this election was stolen when there is impartial certification after certification, and that means the majority of them are, to various degrees, willing to 'do something about it.' And that also probably means that another third of this sample, 15-20 million, is quite ready to believe far far worse - probably beyond what QAnon believes currently. The more of them believe insane things, the more they convince each other of further insanities, and the more convinced each of them becomes of the necessity of acting on beliefs of which they've convinced themselves.
The continuity of any society depends not only on the consent of the governed but on the consensus - a wide and diverse variety of people have to operate under widely shared basic assumptions of how a society should be constructed. The construction may be unfair and unequal and unjust, or even incorrect, or even an illusion, but because the consensus is widely shared, the society does not collapse. But once the consensus collapses, once the basic perceptions of reality alter from person to person, so then does the limitations of what people will convince themselves to do in order to enact what they believe is the correct way to build a society - and that's how people die by the millions.
So on the one hand, I have no end of horror at the unthinkables that may soon come for us all. On the other hand, I'm as fucking exhausted as anybody during all this - because everybody else in America is currently convinced that they're absolutely right too, and nobody is listening to them either. At this point, to a small extent at least, we all just sort of say 'them's the breaks,' 'c'est la vie,' 'azai geyt das.'
So on the other hand, no matter how much of my own life I live in crippling emotional agony, I feel slightly less lonely by knowing that in a few years all of our problems will be insignificant, because it seems to me in my melancholia-tinted lenses that war is probably coming for us all - civil war, war with China, war with Russia, any of them could be so chaotic that once we're caught up in the maelstrom, the details are insignificant. How do you even fathom planning for any of these eventualities? No matter how likely they may be, every contingency within them seems imponderably distant.
But statistics compiled in good faith don't lie, and economically, militarily, politically, and historically, it just makes sense that war is coming for all of us: good and evil, deserving and undeserving, those who want to live and those who pray for death. However good or bad we feel right now, it doesn't matter. I could take whoever wouldn't be bored enough to stop reading through a mountain of statistics, you don't want to read it dear lurker, and I am too depressed to do the homework, yet again....
But no matter what comes next, what always matters is survival, not our own survival, but the survival of us. At some point, death comes for every person, but the society, the polity, the communities, the institutions, the families and the extra-human organizations which forms each of us into individuals who draw meaning through our lives - they can live on so long as some humans live on long enough to take care of them. A good life is a life that lets those organizations live on past our deaths. So therefore the young always take precedence over the old. What gets us through to the other side, what gives us the will to keep going, as in every conflict, is the hope that the next generation may get the chance to get things right that we didn't get, and if not them, then the generation after them, and the generation thereafter, and after, and after. So long as life keeps going, we can at least try to give who comes next a chance to get things a little more right than we did.
....maybe a part 2 later....
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