Tomorrow Is The Election And My Inner Cat Is Pacing The Floor Of My Brain.

        It's the day before the 2020 Presidential Election and all I want to do is go to sleep and wake up the day after tomorrow - make that two days after tomorrow; no let's say  three; or maybe even four or five.
        Fat chance, though, when I - an inveterate insomniac - typically can't manage to get through a night without popping awake every two hours in even the most serene of times which, let's face it, these past four years have not been, not to mention the past eight months, less to mention the past few weeks, least of all to mention these last few days before the Election.
       It's not only that I can't wrap my head around the idea that Donald Trump could win another four years; I likewise can't bring myself to believe that Joe Biden might actually win. I'm drifting in a sort of surreal pre-election Twilight Zone. Aren't we all.
       After the 2016 Presidential polling debacle that coolly predicted Hilary Clinton trouncing Donald Trump I promised myself I'd never again trust  the poll numbers.
      And I don't, not one bit. And yet all day long I'm on the internet clicking around from Fivethirtyeight to the CNN Poll of Polls to the New York Times Upshot and back again, poring over the latest poll numbers state by state as if they were cosmic runes or mystic tea leaves whose prognostications I no more believe than I would that of a Magic 8 Ball.

        So go figure.
​     Two of my children, my son and one of my daughters, are going to be poll workers here in Franklin County - that's the metropolitan Columbus, Ohio area - on Election Day tomorrow. And while I'm over-the-top proud of them for being among the thousands of young people who've risen to the occasion to serve on this Election Day, visions of right-wing militias and caravans of pick-up trucks flying Trump flags wreaking discord, confusion, and intimidation, maybe even violence at the polling places dance in my head.

    American Presidential elections have always been times of anxiety-tinged excitement, but when did any of us ever think we'd live to see the day when such a terrible national fear of dysfunction, chaos and violence would loom over an election? How, in one single election cycle, did the United States shift from being a country where we its citizens take peaceful, democratic elections and transitions of power for granted to the model of a lawless banana republic dictatorship where retail stores across the country are boarding up their display windows with plywood in anticipation of post-election violence? How did America become this place?

       But of course we know how it happened. Our fellow Americans let it happen four years ago.

     See you on the other side of the election. May all our fears come to naught.