Yes, We Could. A decade ago, anyway.

[child_of_the_air]

Well, we survived yesterday.  It certainly wasn't a miracle, but it was better than I was half-expecting, and we're in a better position to survive the next two years than we had been.  I got through the night with a lot of support from friends, ate too much chocolate, and ended up skipping class this morning to sleep ten hours, which I really needed.  (I was barely able to sleep at all on Monday night.)

What I can't stop thinking about, though, is how much politics has changed in the last decade.  It's been ten years since Election Day 2008.  Although I did vote in the 2006 mid-term election, 2008 was the first presidential election I was an adult for, and the first election I really felt involved in.  

Like most of my friends, I'd gone through high school and college learning to fear the Republicans as I watched Bush the Younger do horrible thing after horrible thing.  I wasn't one of the really early Obama fans, but I voted for him in the primary, and I was quite excited about the idea we might actually have a non-evil president.  Excited enough that I actually canvassed for him, even though I found it terrifying.

Back in 2008, it was hard for me not to feel optimistic about the future of the country.  Most of my political consciousness had happened under Bush, so I was used to thinking of that as a baseline, and the idea that Obama could get elected, with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and control of the House made it feel like things were getting better. 

And then there was same-sex marriage.  Those were still the days where I found it hard to believe it would be legal nationally in decades, if ever.  Proposition 8 passing was a huge disappointment to me, and made me quite angry with California, where I was at school at the time, and had been for several years.  But, at the same time, that seemed like a setback, but an unsurprising one in what would surely be a decades-long fight.

Also, even though it was unclear for a while if the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate or not--and then they lost them fairly quickly to a random guy with a pickup truck--I didn't really think it was as big a deal as it was.  In those days, I thought that the Republicans were still willing to compromise.  And, honestly, I think things were actually a bit different then...it wasn't until Obama was elected and the Republican Party decided that its primary goal had to be stopping a black president from doing anything, that Congress really completely broke down.

In any case, if you'd told me in mid-November 2008 that in ten years, we'd have a fascist president but that same-sex marriage would be legal everywhere, I probably wouldn't have believed you.  Of course, I also wouldn't have believed just how much the Tea Party and Mitch McConnell would do to destroy the functioning and legitimacy of the legislature and judiciary, either.

For the record, it was when Mitch McConnell announced that he wouldn't allow President Obama to replace Justice Scalia that I finally concluded that the American government was irreparably broken.  I still didn't quite expect that Trump would get elected, but when he did, I felt like the floor had fallen out from under me.  All my hope for the future of the country, and for the idea that things would get better in the long run, kind of fell apart.  If Trump could be president, and get to appoint new Supreme Court justices, how could there be a future for the country?

Honestly, I still can't bring myself to believe we have a future.  Trump hasn't been as horrible as he could have---he hasn't staged a coup or anything, yet at least---but he's been quite horrible, and we have two more years of him doing awful things.  Plus, we Scalia and Kennedy replaced by his appointees, Federalist Society shills who want to destroy everything I care about will control the Supreme Court for a generation more.  (I know that Court-packing is an option, but doing so would be one more step down a path I'm scared to go down.)

These election results will help some, and I'm going to try to keep going.  But I'm still terrified that Justice Ginsburg won't survive long enough for a Democrat to replace her.  And that the damage Trump does to people's lives will keep expanding and becoming more irreversible.  And, well, a part of my would really like to run away to somewhere else...except that it seems that the tide of fascism is rising everywhere, and I have no idea where could be safe.  And, of course, there's the reality that my chosen family is important to me, and is nearby, and I'm terrified of the idea of trying to move further away from them.