795
I was gonna title this "And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice" and then write "Stuck inside of America with the fascism blues again" here, but I'm not sure if that comes off like gloating and that's honestly the last thing I want to do this morning.
They could, or they might not. The biggest thing is that we already have been through 4 years of Trump. We have some idea of what that will look like, we aren't going in completely blind.
As far as this "being the last election", there's too many safeguards in our governmental system and too many armed people (in both the civilian and military population) with deep vested interests to ensure real elections still happen for that to change.
There's a hell of a lot of posturing and hot air going on and that has gone on from Trumps camp that has absolutely no true way to get force behind it.
Things will be bad, but panicking will just make it thay much harder to distinguish true threats and problems from what isn't.
Think of it like this: Your car is stalled on a train track, and there's a train coming a few minutes away. There's also someone with a gun in your backseat about to shoot you. The train makes more noise, but the more immediate threat is the guy with the gun. Being more calm helps to discern those sorts of distinctions, and that the best solution would be to run from your car rather than try to pump the gas.
For every could, might, and may there's a didn't, might not, etc. You could start pissing blood tomorrow, but I assume you're in good health that you probably won't. But you still technically could.
The news media across the board is optimizing for ad views to support their existence with money. Keeping people stressed out increases viewership, so it's in their best interests to put everything through a funhouse mirror and rely on technicalities and speculation to stoke emotional response. There's been studies done and books published on this.
Bad times are not end times.
I'm not so sure considering there's a good argument to be made that this wasn't a "real" election, given all the voter suppressing bullshit that happened. I think we need to ask ourselves what a "real" election is and how we will know if we lose them, because I don't think even our good elected officials are going to tell us about it (because they think, arguably correctly, that living under a stable autocracy is better than the chaos that could happen when a mass of people reject the legitimacy of the government).
This is true and cannot be said enough. The world doesn't end, it moves on to the next struggle, and there is always a way to make it better. It might be very small, but there is always something to do. Like, yesterday I ended up up hanging out with some very sad old ladies who volunteered for my local League of Women Voters chapter and got them to laugh a couple of times at how ridiculously bad at bridge I am, and that was the little bit of good I could do yesterday. It wasn't much, but it was something.