On track to where

 

Subject: On track to where.

Now that the final votes are being counted to determine who occupies the White House for the next 4 years and with increasingly bitter rancour  coming from President Trump as he contemplates defeat, something he is not used to, one wonders how the nation will heal itself given that the country is split 50/50. It's always forgotten that whilst 50% of the people who will see themselves as winners it still  leaves 50% who will consider themselves losers and it's much harder to concede you have lost than to bathe in the glow of a win. The use of Twitter to fire broadsides at his opponents has been the hallmark of the incumbent president from the get go. His open hostility to the legal team investigating his involvement in Russia and then the attempt to gather dirt on Joe Biden's son from the President of the Ukraine set the tone of his term in office. He belittled anyone who crossed him and used Twitter to cast disparaging innuendo which were then read as gospel by his followers. He has poisoned the minds of many with his belligerency and once the genie is out of the bottle it's almost impossible to get it back in particularly In a society who don't have much truck with governance and who actively arm themselves to ensure that their own opinions are heard and respected. it seems that the nation is broken.

I know we said the same about our own nation over Brexit where a sizeable section of society didn't want to go down the path of disengagement with Europe, from which we still haven't experienced any withdrawal pain since we don't actually leave until the end of the year and tariffs and the inevitable price rises, plus the shortages are still to come. What will be the level of rancour then as we have to adjust, after 40 years of self serving assumptions are ravaged and we are forced to eat chlorinated chicken.

Societies seem to have a traditional temperament based on a number of things, one of the main ones being the security people feel in general. Destabilise a society and one never knows where you will end up, from the benign to the facist and anywhere in between. In America resentment still lingers from the Civil War, a war based on idealism and ideology rooted in people raised with very different perspectives. The perspective we acquire from childhood moderated by living in the real world speaks volumes about us and our beliefs. We might take to the streets with a banner or, if we are really worked up, take on the authorities who externalise their power through the police force. In the extreme case of religious fundamentalism which fosters groups like ISIS, the backlash is to  commit atrocities in the name of Allah.

The plethora of discontent and an unwillingness to see the other sides point of view only takes an anarchist to upend the fine balance between the disparate groups which make up any society. Social turbulence makes the people coalesce in strange ways and we might be in for a very rocky ride over the next few years.