I couldn’t have been any more wrong.

The fact that there are millions of others who got it complexly wrong doesn’t provide any solace on this dark night.  Seeing the graphic on my TV set “Donald Trump Elected President” is like stepping into a DC Comics’ Bizarro World  … or an alternate reality like The Man in the High Castle.  The joke is now truly on all of us.

It’s now time for some serious introspection.  I truly believed that the majority of this country would not vote for a candidate who spewed fear, hate, racism, and sexism.  I truly believed that we had more character and would not ignore key human values of decency and kindness and rational thought for what . . . some hypothetical Supreme Court nominee or a political agenda?

I couldn’t have been any more wrong.

This is a bad flashback to the year 2000.  I remember watching the election returns in a bar in Hollywood called the Frolic 2 (which is no longer in existence).  The six or seven of us who stayed until last call were all just dumbfounded that the race was that close, and that Gore could actually lose.  As the clock passed 2 am and the race still had not been called, the bartender let us stay and gave us beer for free (since they couldn’t legally sell it at that hour).

At some point we all came to the realization that nobody would be elected president that night/early morning, and we left the bar in a daze that had nothing to do with the booze.  I remember walking back to my apartment on June Street with my good buddy Bradleigh, and we both knew we had just witnessed an ugly point in American history.  But there was still hope for Gore to win.

As it got later in the game tonight and all signs were pointing toward a Trump victory, I was still holding out hope that Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would be close enough to warrant a recount.  But it would not be, and Clinton conceded.  And even if we got the recount like sixteen years ago, back then it still ended badly.

This is 2000 all over again, except at least back then you could say George Bush (even if you disagreed with his politics) held some core competencies to be president and was a decent human being.  Trump falls short on both counts.  What that man did during the election, even if half of what he said he didn’t really believe and it was only done to get votes, was embarrassing.

I didn’t think the good people of this country would endorse Donald Trump.

I couldn’t have been any more wrong.

“Anybody who thinks that it doesn’t matter who’s president’ has never been drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world — or been beaten and gassed by police for trespassing on public property — or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons — or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is president or governor or police chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.”

-Hunter S. Thompson, from “Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk”

“Human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.”

-Narrator from “Idiocracy”, written by Mike Judge and Etan Cohen.