Winter Isn't Coming, It's Here

This post is a throwback, since I am writing it in a coffee house. I'm here in the evening because the roads in my town are so impassable from a snowstorm that I can't drive home yet. The town was unprepared for this storm, which is much more severe than predicted. The plows have been absent and the roads left unsande.

This seems to be a metaphor for our current political moment. So many predicted only a light snow but now we are getting buried in snow and ice, and the response has been tepid and inadequate. And just as the roads in my town are full of desperate people running out of gas having realized their fate too late, a lot of folks in our country have only now understood that we are up against fascism. 

Winter isn't coming, it's here.

Trump's attempt to intervene in the Florida recount goes against any precedent I've seen in my lifetime, and the response is basically a shrug and bemused chuckle from the liberal sectors of the media. The conservative media, on the other hand, is giving Trump's baseless accusations full-throated approval.What we have here is a president trying to interrupt the Democratic process for his benefit, and there's hardly been a response.

The same goes for Trump installing a whackadoodle con artist as Attorney General just so that he can protect himself from prosecution. Again, the response has been inadequate. Some protests, to be sure, but nothing that has the ability to stop this. This is not Watergate. After this Saturday Night Massacre there will be no Supreme Court subpoenas of presidential documents because this Supreme Court has become the judicial arm of the conservative movement. 

I am sitting here in a Starbucks drinking mediocre coffee and listening to bland music because people weren't prepared for winter. I am living in a country on the brink of losing what little democracy it ever had because so few are prepared to fight the fight that needs to be fought. I am losing hope that by the time enough people see the light, it will have been too late.