My plan Tuesday was not to sit around watching the television glued to the senate race in Georgia. Honestly, I figured the Democrats would get one seat and the Republicans would keep the other. Whatever happened, happened. I had no control over the outcome and I learned long ago to not stress too much about the things that I couldn’t control. I have enough to stress about as is. It was what it was.

Tuesday, we decided to try Beyond Beef tacos. Spoiler: not only was I repulsed by it, I ended up covered in hives. It wasn’t fun. I couldn’t sleep, so I stayed up probably until 3 or 4 watching CNN’s election coverage because maybe it’d help me sleep. It didn’t. I was miserable and itchy and the hives burned and I wanted to scratch the hell out of them. I was shocked by what was going on in the election, which was actually helping to distract me. Would they actually win both seats? To me, it wasn’t so much that the Democrats won those races; it was the Republicans who are turning their own base away from them.

As an independent, who probably aligns more with a weird mesh of libertarian/democratic belief system, I get it from both sides. I get people mad at me, screaming about how I’m some socialist liberal when I point out the flawed belief system around Trumpism. When I agree with Republican politicians, I’m called a snowflake sheep Trumper. I’m neither. I seem to be unique in my belief of you can exist somewhere in the middle. At least if you’re a Republican or Democrat, you only really have to deal with the other side ganging up on you.

Back to my story.

Wednesday, exhausted and dealing with continuing sinus issues. I had planned on spending the day watching coverage of the counting of the elector votes. I knew it would be a historic moment and I wanted to be able to talk about it in the future with my youngest or my future grandchildren, mocking the insanity. History was going to unfold right in front of my eyes. They were going to fight about this all day, wasting everyone’s time in futile attempts that were ultimately going to fail. There was no fraud; these objections were purely motivational of people trying to get their last minute brownie points from the Trumpist base for their own future ambitions. When in reality, they should just let the hardcore ideals of Trumpism die with the ending of his presidency. Then what’s left of the shambles of the Grand Ol’ Party could recover their reputation, try to overcome this past, and become better people in the future.

I was right in all the wrong ways. I watched in horror as the events unfolded on my screen. It didn’t seem real. After living through the unreal experience of the pandemic, this still seemed like I was living in a fantasy world. There’s no way, not in America, that this would happen. We grew up being told that America was better than this. We grew up being told that this was a land where we were safe and free. These events make me question these apparent lies we were told. I didn’t feel like it was me sitting on the couch watching reality. It felt like me indulging in my sweet pleasures of trash “unscripted” television, watching an episode of “90 Day Fiancé” where some things are just too ridiculous to be real life. This wasn’t the America I grew up in. This would never have happened in that America. The America that stood together on 9/11. That America that came together during the Boston Marathon bombing. This is an America were there are people refusing to call these people for what they were: terrorists literally attacking our democracy.

This is almost like when you are watching the news when another country has their election and you know they are corrupt. The ones where America goes in with their shiny knight armor to save the day. The heroes of democracy, a role America tries to play every chance they get because they feel their approach to government is the ideal and superior to other countries. We are acting like that country today that needs America to come save. Only it’s us… and apparently we can’t save ourselves.

I kept saying that the division would ruin our country. My blogs reiterated the danger of this division. To watch something unfold that I only thought was possible in my imagination, doesn’t seem real. It’s not right and this is not the America I want my kids to grow up in. It seemed like something even too ridiculous for fiction. But here it was, our current reality.

I was reminded by a dear friend about how I would always right in my early days of my blog about how I taught my oldest to be the change he wanted to see in the world. That the future was his and he can help make it better. These are lessons I’m trying to teach my youngest. They are the future. It’s too late for us now, but it’s not too late for them. We can teach them to be better than we are. Because dammit, our country… our world… deserves better than this.