Purgatory

Purgatory is the word that immediately came to mind when I woke today to see where we stand as a nation. You know, it's that 'in between' place that the Catholics believe exist, where you aren't alive anymore - because America as we knew it clearly isn't alive anymore - but you haven't quite completed your journey to the afterlife yet because you haven't made good on your sinful debts.

Just a super cool place of suffering until a final judgement is made.

At least I think that's what it was...I never really paid much attention in Catholic school, because I always thought the whole thing was weird. Priests and nuns always seemed super angry to me, they had 'Monte Carlo Night' while claiming gambling was a sin, and money to be 'the root of all evil' , and God said idolatry was sinful, but the minute you lost your car keys they'd hand you an action figure of St. Anthony and tell you to ask it to find them like it was some sort of fucking Buzz Lightyear that thrust itself into adventures the minute you left the room.

In short, it became abundantly clear to me that the Catholics and I weren't BFF.
I had too many questions and objections, and they had too many demerits and detentions.
So, we simply 'consciously uncoupled' as Goopeth Paltrow would say.

Still, I couldn't help but think about this particular fairy tale of theirs this morning, because I think it's where so many find themselves. Yet that was just my initial thought, because after it left me, I realized that there's unfortunately a far more impactful issue to consider here.

For the last four years, so many of my friends on the Left, the unsullied Right, and degenerates like myself, told ourselves that 2016 was an anomaly; a mere glitch in the matrix, as it were. That while we personally didn't understand falling for the ruse of the 'successful businessman' Donald Trump because we knew that he was anything but, that we sort of 'got it' for others if they didn't.
Besides, he was an unknown in the political arena and people wanted to see what would happen if we shook up the system, right?
People really didn't like Hillary Clinton, and more importantly, the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie and people were angry and didn't vote, so there was that to factor in too, right?
Oh, oh, and Russia interfered, so that probably played into it too remember!
OH, OH, OH...and Hillary still won the popular vote by 3 million votes!
And so the polls weren't completely worthless because it all still fell into the 3% margin of error!

So this time, my 'we're better than this' Americans, we were going to see a huge correction to that glitch we saw in 2016! People have seen the monumental failure of leadership that Trump brought to the table! People have seen that he was never really the successful businessman they believed him to be!
They've watched him tell an unprecedented amount of lies! They've watched him tweet out his supporters yelling 'WHITE POWER!"! They've seen his rejection of science, fact, and reality, lead to a horrendous loss of American lives! They've watched an unprecedented number of his own party, intelligence agencies, and military leaders denounce him as a threat to the nation! 

And besides all of that, and all of the other displays of moral and ethical bankruptcy so grand that it puts the nation's best 4th of July fireworks presentation to shame, people like Joe Biden much more than anyone liked Hillary Clinton, right?
He's no where near as divisive! No where near as polarizing!

At any rate...this time, the polls were past the 3% margin of error!

Right?
RIGHT?

Wrong.
It was all...wrong.
And so here we sit this morning...in purgatory.

But the bigger point is, it doesn't even matter which way it goes now.
It doesn't matter if when the very last vote is counted, Biden is the 46th President of the United States of America.
The simple truth is, that after everything we've seen - after all of the disgusting displays we've seen from Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters, after all of the revelations that have come to light, it should have never even been close.
We shouldn't be here in this moment.
Not if the America we believed in really existed.
There should never have even been an atmosphere that allowed him to fraudulently claim victory.
There instead should have been in ear piercing, a soul crushing, rebuke of Donald Trump and his 'MAGA' movement from America!
But there wasn't.
Because in the words of Childish Gambino, addressing what so many on the Left, Middle, and Anti-Trump Right need to reconcile in their minds today and in the foreseeable future...This Is America.
This IS America...breathe it in, kids.

Over the last four years, Donald Trump not only 'shot someone on 5th Avenue' his victim was Lady Liberty. And as she lay there bleeding out all of the American symbolism of truth, justice, democracy and safe harbor, he urinated on her face while disdainfully uttering "Fake News" under his breath.

Yet we stand here in purgatory; unable to know whether our nation just asked for a second helping.
And even if in the end it didn't, we need to accept how many did.

There's one final thought that occurs to me this morning...
Should Donald Trump find himself in office for a second term, I think CNN and MSNBC can kiss all of their ratings goodbye.
I mean...who's going to sit and listen to all of that again? Who's going to care what Trump did or said today, when we now know, in a way that many of us never were confronted with before, that the tenets of American virtue are nothing more than a '3 Card Monte' hustle?

Wait, did I just stumble upon what it's like to be a minority? HA!

And now if you're someone that's really in despair today, I'd like to remind you that you going to be okay regardless. You have the promise of your friends, your family, bourbon, extra cheese, and Netflix to get you through.

So in the words of the prophet Walter Soback...

"Nothing is fucked here, dude. Nothing is fuuuuucked."