I spent a lot of time on Facebook & Twitter. So it’s really different to have shut them off, even if it’s just for a day so far. One thing that’s interesting is that there isn’t nearly as much to do on my phone as there was before, which means I’m doing less on it, and more on other things. Read a bit last night. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe (highbrow!) and got a bit further in Mark Webber (an ex-F1 driver I like)’s autobiography. Both good, but I’d only recommend them to people who come into them with some context. 🙂

It’s been an interesting few days, emotionally, as well. I want to hold out some optimism that the worst won’t happen, and that maybe there are valid reasons that people voted for our supposed President-elect. But then I read about his cabinet picks, and NOPE right out of there again. It’s just … comically awful. But I suppose that’s what we’ve asked for.

I have a really hard time reconciling Johnson/Stein voters, though – because while I get how Trump voters can vote for Trump (the reasons aren’t good, but I get why) – Stein/Johnson voters knew better, but decided that throwing a hissy fit was more important than stopping Trump, and I can’t wrap my head around that. It means that they understood what a threat Trump was, and instead of voting to stop him, they voted for “ideological purity” over “actual reality”, which, when you consider that real people will be actually affected by his policy, means you’re either catastrophically selfish, or a total sucker for the GOP Clinton hate machine. And I literally cannot find any other reason that anyone would vote for Johnson or Stein, two candidates that are as massively unfit for the Presidency as Trump.

So. Yeah. I think we’re in for a long four years. And I don’t know what to do, because I don’t think the problem is as simple as “campaign harder”. This campaign, which we’re essentially going to be fighting again in 2020, isn’t about facts and reason and policy. It’s about who shouts loudest, because there’s no basis in reality. Trump didn’t propose anything other than a primal scream. He has no policy. He has no plan. So people didn’t vote for anything that can be reasonably articulated. Campaign harder? How? When you’re campaigning against fantasy with no basis in reality, reality doesn’t win, because reality is complicated and messy.

The problem is reality. The problem is education. The problem is that there’s no accountability in our media, and profits, rather than truth, drives everything. So to me, I think fixing what’s wrong with out government has (relatively) little to do with campaign finance reform (though it obviously has a lot to do with it), but it has much, much more to do with education & media, and I have absolutely no clue how to work to have an impact on that on a broad enough scale that it will mean anything.