This experiment is not working

God doesn't really protect drunks; that's a happy myth, a leftover fairy tale from a time when the bars stayed open until 2 am.

Whether there is a God isn't the point. The point is that we should have seen it coming.

Many of us did, many of us spoke up in one way or another. Many of us marched, wrote letters, knocked on doors, did what we thought we could about what we were seeing.

What did we see? We saw the wrong people being chosen as leaders by people who'd swallowed their monstrous lie, good people living in cities and towns and villages who voted into office people who said they had good people's best interests at heart but did not, and never did have.

The wrong peopie were in charge, yet again, in every branch of the government--judicial, legislative, executive. These 'leaders' could only provide faux leadership, faux leadership is the best they could do; the worst they could do, which they so often did, was disastrous, as some of us knew it would be.

Hadn't we been traumatized enough, the peak trauma occuring November, 2016.

Then the number of disasters multiplied overwhelmingly, like a virus.

Most of us practiced a form of patient watching and waiting, as if in a cancer ward. 

To cheer each other up we shared our nightmares. We shook our heads as if we couldn't believe what we were seeing and hearing, but what we were seeing and hearing kept coming and coming, oozing out of cancerous pores, oozily. 

We kept waking up to the jowly spectacled Senator speaking to the press, with four or five other Senators standing behind him for visual heft and propaganda value, repeating the lie. We kept watching the President's mouth move in its tiny imperfect concentric circles, opening and closing lie upon lie. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court made the cover of Fortune Magazine.

The side we were on was only incrementally more believable. The side we were on said the right things but used the wrong words.

Once again we were losing, as were all the good people who'd believed the lies of the people they'd put in power who said they had their best interests at heart.  

This experiment is not working. It's not working, not working, not working.

What can we do?

A new message is desperately needed.

Double-truck editorial, The New York Times, May 10, 2020, pinned to the author's wall, yet another wake-up call to what is soon coming.