Bookshop fight back is doomed
AT 5am yesterday morning I woke up with my heart racing. I’d spent the previous day doom scrolling through Twitter looking for something to ease my nerves/confirm my fears that Trump was going to win. I’d slept badly and when I did drop off, I had vivid, awful dreams about the Donald declaring a coup.
It was dark when I woke and having confirmed via Twitter that there was no Biden landslide and that everything was still in play I tried to calm down, pay attention, be mindful. Not easy in a pitchblack room.
Somewhere at the end of the bed the cat was sleeping, or at least I think he was. The only noise I could hear was the clock ticking in the hall and the odd passing car on the road on the other side of the canal.
I started thinking back to 2016 and how I felt when Trump was elected last time. That was more shock than anything, but I remember that day being brutal. This one feels worse.
Partly because we’ve had four years of the man in power and he has been everything we could have expected: a charlatan, a man willing to separate children from their parents and pretend that the coronavirus didn’t exist. If he wins, we know we can expect more and worse.
Partly, too, I think, because we are living through a year when life has, for large parts of the country (the world for that matter) and for large amounts of time, been effectively shut down.
We are living in a restricted space, geographically and psychologically. We are all to some degree trapped in our houses and trapped in our heads. To be honest, the only thing that’s keeping me going is football on the radio just for the vague facsimile of normality it offers.
Everything feels heightened, feels, in this case, dreadful, because so many of the distractions we could normally count on aren’t available. I’m just hoping that at some point today the cat lets me pet him for a change. That would be something.
As I write this, Trump has declared himself a winner before all the votes are counted. Who knows where we go from here? Nowhere good, I imagine. The corrosive, divisive politics we’ve been living through for years isn’t going away. We are stuck with it.
Yes, the sun will rise tomorrow, we might lose the TV control and the washing machine may go on the blink. All those everyday things will take over again. But not right now. Right now is a terrible place.