well shit.

From a poetic standpoint, I guess the fact that it was chilly and raining when I left the house this morning was appropriate. The rain was falling like the markets started to do last night as I was going to sleep, not particularly confident of the result I was looking for, but still holding out hope that a couple unlikely bastions o fwhite working-class resentment in the Northeast would fall our way. When I went to sleep, the cat was still in the box, in quantum flux, but things were starting to smell a little ripe.

Waking up to the news that “Donald J. Trump is President-elect of the United States” wasn’t the result I was hoping to see, but when I turned the lights off at around 11:30, it’s what I was pretty sure I was going to get.

And, like a lot of people, I’m trying to come to terms with that.

Being a gainfully-employed, well-educated white guy, I honestly probably don’t have that much to worry about personally, other than my retirement investments tanking, at least temporarily, given what the markets started doing once the outcome started to become clear last night. That said, I’m not just looking out for me. I’m not sure what this is going to mean for the kids I’m getting ready to send out into the world; I’m having a hard time imagining, given the rhretoric coming from the right, that my daughter, who will ideally be graduating from college four years from now, is going to have a favorable employment environment. I can’t be entirely confident my LGBT friends and neighbors are going to have the same general sense of their arc of history trending towards justice. I worry about the health and well-being of pretty much everyone who’s not a straight white Christian male, be it in terms of being able to get medical care, practice or not whatever religion they see fit to, or walk down the street unmolested. I have a hard time seeing the country trending toward a sense of shared purpose; I can’t see the surprisingly large segment of the population of this country who spent the last eight years indulging their inner racist outwardly because a black family was living in the White House are going to settle down and suddenly play nice and gracious because their guy won in what was actually a very tight squeaker of an election.

But, it seems like that’s what happened. I’ve purposely not looked at any of the coverage yet before getting my hot take tapped out in electrons and sent out there. I wanted to get my thoughts out there before reading anyone else’s commentary. That’s what you’re reading here.

What’s a little odd, but not really, is the fact that I’m kind of resigned about the whole thing. I ought to be hopping mad, but I’m just kind of numb. I suspect that’s mostly my Gen-X ironic detachment coming through, as I become increasingly aware that I’m part of a forgotten generation whose lot in history is to basically keep things chugging along while the larger generations on either side of us bang on each other…well, I guess it’s mostly the boomers punching down at the millenials with crippling student debt and shitty job markets, but they’re both kind of standing on my neck to keep that slap fight going.

And last night was, I’m hoping, the last gasp of the older generation raising their stink about their world crumbling. By the time this Trump term comes to an end in 2020, no matter what happens, white folks are going to be the minority in this country. No matter how many red ballcaps the rust belt wears, old-style manufacturing isn’t coming back; we’ve moved on to a high-tech and information based economy. That’s just the way things are. it’s bigger than the United States; it’s just the way the world is going, and all the screaming and pouting and insults aren’t going to change anything.

Leading from that, I don’t think the world is going to end; merely the image of the world exemplified by “great again” embroidered on those red hats. That world, that soft-focus black-and-white image is gone. Donald Trump isn’t going to bring it back, if it ever existed at all. The universe keeps moving on, mostly oblivious to all of us.

Not that I don’t think even four years of a Trump presidency isn’t going to leave a mark or two. I can’t see typical republican policies (and rest assured, that’s what’s coming) doing anything different than it ever has – the rich aren’t going to create jobs if you lower their taxes. Education and infrastructure don’t get better unless you fund them adequately. Foreign affairs aren’t going to improve with the application of bullying and bluster. And yeah, the courts are probably going to be regressive for years.

In any case, that’s where the world is this morning. I think, in the end, we’ll survive it, but the next person, whoever that is, is going to end up spending their four or eight years cleaning up after what Trump leaves behind, keeping that person from actually leading this country on to better things.

I hope all those angry white, working-class folks up there in the northeast are happy, because I don’t see it getting better, in the near term, for them, or for me.

As for me, besides what I knocked out in the 800 or so words above, I see it as kind of the bell-end of a pretty shitty 2016, where we lost a bunch of influential artists and gained…this.