Let’s Do Something Else Tomorrow

It has all, of course, been said. All that’s left, if you are not one of the 80 million or so who have already voted early or by mail, is to head out there and hit the correct button or fill in the correct little oval. Then, in a few hours, it will be over, at least for those of us not tasked with the counting. Then maybe we can do something else.

That’s not to dismiss the weeks and months of angry screaming that will emanate not just from Trump, should he lose, but from all the worst people in the country. There will be concerted efforts to blow the whole thing up, and most of us can only hope that those with power have some decent plans to stop them.

It’s just that it will be nice, finally, to stop thinking about him — or at least to start stopping. The keening will continue, and the media will keep dutifully printing the vaguely sane meaning somewhere adjacent to the actual words, but it won’t have the same weight. There are the trials and lawsuits and so on, and those will certainly be of interest. There are all his lackeys and failsons and various sickly offshoots, and they won’t disappear, but none have ever managed his strange degree of pull. It will all just sort of diminish.

The way our endless campaigns work has a way of making the final months feel saturated, like literally nothing else is happening. A convincing (to normal people) victory over the most malignant political force in modern American history, a person who inexplicably has commanded more of our collective attention over the last decade than seems possible, would at very least allow something… else… to happen. We can all, figuratively speaking, go outside.