(Pandemic Diary - day 252)

From my journal: 5 November 2020 (Thursday)

I’m not as ridden with this today, because even though it’s still an open question, it’s looking more and more like a Biden victory.

Not that I haven’t been reading news and doom-scrolling Facebook and so on, but mainly I just feel like I have to keep checking in to catch the announcement as soon as it comes out. One of these four remaining states (Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania) will be called eventually (well, they’ll all be called eventually) and it will put Biden over the top.

They’re all close, they are all still counting, they’re mainly drifting from red to blue as mail-in ballots from urban areas counter the red mirage created by in-person voting, and we need only one of the four to get to 270 electoral votes. And sometime between right now and maybe the end of the day I think they’ll have enough information to call at least one of them.

Not that it will end there — it almost certainly won’t. But I feel hopeful that Trump’s wailing and whining and litigating will mainly be noise. It will drag out the official verdict through the coming days (probably) and it will cause more discord than we already have, but it’s not at all a surprise, and it won’t change anything in the end (or so I hope and believe).

So what have I been seeing as I do that scrolling? Well for one thing, a lot of people (people meaning FB friends) are just not on there now, or at least they’re not posting anything.

Notably, the tone is starting to change for some of the hottest of the Trump trolls. Of course there’s the expected mirroring of Trump’s wailing, the allegations of fraud and so on, but there’s also an undertone of despair, I think.

And some of them have just gone silent.

On the other side, the usual suspects are as loud as ever, but in general the posts are fairly subdued, and no one seems to be really jumping the gun or celebrating too early or rubbing things in.

I guess maybe we all sense the tenuous nature of this period we’re in, the possibility, small but real, that it could still go wrong, the threat of violence that is not far below the surface.

And there’s the juvenile nature of the stereotypical Trumpster (it might be part of what draws them to him in the first place) — they’re reactionary and explosive and must be handled with care, like problem 5-year-olds who don’t yet have much space between stimulus and response.

I hope the restraint continues even after the announcement, and I hope we have the good sense to just stand back, let them have their tantrums, let them burn themselves out, let them go through their stages of grief, and just go about our business with the knowledge that adults will soon be back in charge.