Well, I guess I’ve got to say a word or two about this…
As the many of you who read these blogs are aware of, I’ve become rather atypically political these past few months. I trust most of you to read and listen, absorb and think, and come up with well-considered opinions of your own. Nobody really needs to know what I think about anything. I’m a fiction writer, after all, with a comical bent. Even the narrator of my own songs is usually not the real me. But, well - this past November 3rd election day was unlike any other I’ve experienced in my not-so-brief lifetime. A divided nation was on the precipice of utter disaster.
Election night was not comfortable by any means. I’d been one of the few around me to brush off panicked liberal worries by insisting Joe had this one in the bag. All he needed to do was win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania without losing any of the other states Hilary had won four years ago. And while this rather naïve world view ended up being exactly correct, the path leading to this outcome didn’t seem likely at around, say, 10pm Tuesday night.
My immediate family and I kept up a thread of texts which will now serve as a personal reminder of those harrowing first hours. We knew Pennsylvania would not count ANY mail-in votes till the next day, but still - Trump somehow was up by 700,000 votes?! Could this dreaded outcome materialize once again??
But this is where I get to the point of saying - Ah!…. HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL!!!
I’d gone to semi-sleep visualizing the reality of another four years of such craven grifting and incompetence. But suddenly Michigan looked better. Wisconsin was heading in the right direction. And of all things, Georgia and Arizona were in play.
Four years ago, walking the morning-after-election streets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan was like slow dancing with a mob of slow-footed zombies. We were all - myself included - in a state of dejected shock. But on November 4th, 2020, New York City was unseasonably warm and friendly. An almost angelic sigh of relief seemed to be drifting amongst all the Covid-19-aware masked pedestrians walking the streets and sidewalks.
And three long but confident mornings later, jubilation erupted.
Now, I have friends who are now as dejected as I was four years ago. This blog is not meant to inflict more personal pain their way. But I’ll close with a repost of a section of my blog from what now seems like the historically ancient month of January, 2020.
So I’ve been glued to the TV screen once again - almost fifty years later. Adam Schiff has been amazing. And every one of those House Managers has absolutely knocked the ball out of the park, in my view. I realize this major effort will likely not end with the result this occasional scriptwriter would prefer. But if Trump gets voted out at the end of this year — 2020! — and goes down in history as the only ONE-TERM IMPEACHED PRESIDENT we’ve ever had — well, I’ll be able to live with that!
We have to remain positive. Justice, in its own sweet time, may just win out again.
OK. That’s enough from me.
And once again - HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL!!! I sincerely can’t wait to see what’s in store for each of us in 2021!!