Two Years Later

     Two years and a day ago, on New Year's Eve 2016, I, like many of my fellow human beings who must share this planet with one another, each of us for whatever our designated time on its surface might be, was still in a state of  shocked  disbelief that this person was going to be President of the United States, the most powerful position on the planet.

     I was still trying to cope with the surreality of what I thought couldn't happen here actually happening here, but on the last day of 2016 I was mostly afraid. I was gripped with fear and anxiety for the future for my country and for myself and those dear to me with our welfare in the hands of a seemingly spoiled, greedy, self-centered capricious, amoral, impulsive, irresponsible, vengeful bigot who would  have the control of our nuclear arsenal under his twitchy thumbs.
      To help myself cope I made a New Year's Eve resolution to stop ruminating about what might happen but rather to take the coming year one day at a time and in one year from then, the last night in December of 2017, to look back over events and recall where our world was at the beginning of the year and see where it was at the end, which, really, was all I could do.
        2017 came and went with our country and the world the worse for wear on so many levels after a chaotic year of Donald Trump at the helm, and yet on the last day of 2017, though we seemed closer than ever to a nuclear war with North Korea, I and everyone I knew was still alive and doing as well as we'd ever done and the acute anxiety I and many others had been gripped with a year earlier had devolved into more of an ongoing state of anxiety-tinged general malaise and disgust as Donald Trump dominated the news daily with his divisive and dangerous antics.  We were still on edge, but the edge had been dulled from over-use.  
        On the last night of 2017  I once again made the same resolution as I'd made the year before, to take 2018 one day at a time, and on the last night of December 2018 to look back over the year's events and recall where the world had been at the beginning of the year and see where it was at the end, and in the meantime to do what I could, in my own little way, to make it a better place.
       And now another year of President Donald Trump has come and gone and here we all are on the first day of the new year, still here. My tiny patch of the planet is still intact. I'm still plenty worried about some things:  the environment; climate change; our crumbling national infrastructure; Trump's trade war;  the National Debt that has sky-rocketed under Trump's careless, needless tax cuts for the rich; the alienation of our allies; North Korea; and mightily enraged about others: the plight of asylum seekers -  especially the suffering children - at our southern border; the criminals, liars and sycophants Donald Trump has put into positions of power and influence and as his aides and advisors; the rank chaos, greed, corruption, and ineptitude that reign in Donald Trump's administration.
      But I'm still here, my internal knots of fear and anxiety from two years ago loosened on the ever-turning wheel of day-to-day existence, and no longer finding myself still having to shake off the disbelief that Donald Trump is actually President. The surreal has become real.
      And I'm also more hopeful than I've been on the past two New Year's Days that Donald Trump will be either be reined in by Congress and our Justice Department or self-destruct before he can bring about the total devastation of our country and/or World War III.
      And last night, in the final hours of 2018, I did not even feel the need to make my previous New Year's Eve's resolution to take a deep breath and take day at a time, such was my hopeful optimism that in a year from now life as we know it will still be going on.
       Happy New Year, Everyone.