I think by the time this hits the paper, we'll likely know who our next president is going to be. I hesitate to be any more definite than likely, it's 2020 after all.
Of course in the year that out bizarres any other of my life, we're going to have a presidential election whose results are reluctant to reveal themselves. The information age gave way to the age of confusion a while back.
If I have to be precise on that last statement, let's pinpoint the date to February 10, 2020. Granted, confusion has been creeping in for years, since Fox News went live and the internet reached critical mass in America.
But February 10 was the date the Oval Office Fraud stated "I think the virus...is going to be fine. Looks like by April...it miraculously goes away."
From that date on, a segment of our population wrote any threat of a pandemic off because the only source they believe said so. Not only that, thanks to the same single source, they decided masks were for the weak. Somehow actions advised by public health professionals to fight a pandemic became plots to take away our rights.
So any chance to actually fight and defeat this pandemic without a vaccine has been kneecapped by misinformed people and a power drunk party actually sueing state governments to allow faster spread of a deadly disease in the name of freedoms never imagined by our founders.
The freedom to lie, the freedom to damage public health, and the freedom to intimidate aren't what the authors of the Bill of Rights had in mind.
Today, while the counters count mail in votes from millions of Americans who preferred not to risk a deadly disease while performing their patriotic duty, the pandemic still being downplayed is running rampant through rural corners of our country. Over 9.4 million Americans have been infected and over 230,000 have died from Covid 19.
The pandemic is real and the numbers are, if anything, on the low side. But we live in the misinformation age. There is a huge difference between being uninformed and misinformed. People who are uninformed tend to know they're uninformed. People who are misinformed seem to have no idea and will fight you over it.
Or, in our specific case, they use that misinformation to vote. Which brings us back to where we are...confused and jumpy as a frog on a slowly heating skillet. Putin's Puppy's claims of a victory notwithstanding, at this writing it looks more likely those early absentee ballots which are last to be counted in several states will swing things toward Uncle Joe.
But even if they do, we're guaranteed weeks of lawsuits and fact mangling, in an attempt to swing them back to Putin's Prize. That's because the reality of Americans making informed decisions and voting upon them is not in the Republican Reality-TV version of this country. Republicans disdain for democracy is based in self-preservation.
When the people of this country decide to take power from corrupt political corporations, aka parties, we might find our way out of the Age of Confusion.