Home »
At the most delicate of crossroads
Kootenay Crust
By Ian Cobb
Op-Ed Commentary
Welcome to the great crossroads – 2020.
As we go about our business today – day 237 of the COVID-19 pandemic – our American neighbours are busying themselves with the business of electing a president.
To put it lightly, this is the most important presidential election of our lifetimes – even for we mousy Canadians.
With racial tensions tighter than they’ve been in 50 years, thanks to a president who has emboldened and inspired the ugly American hater, and an urban/rural divide that has become the new Mason-Dixon line, even the act of voting has taken on a hue of danger today.
I fully anticipate a gun battle at a polling station as some hyper-excitable conspiracy theory inhaling pharma-freak performs a terrible act for his king and lord, Donald J Trump.
Having successfully weaponized the simple act of wearing a mask out of courtesy and respect for your fellow human, and for the good of one’s self, and having successfully laid a quadruple coiler of bullshit in every corner of the land, Donnie Bonespurs, the weakest tough guy president imaginable, has managed to turn his once great nation into a place Amnesty International is now warning people about visiting, citing terrorism.
It is all so surreal and unimaginable. Imagine Canada turning into a frothing sack of spewing hatred like that.
With a prime minister and sitting government that is slathered in scandals, inspiring anti-Canadian sentiments from our own cults of hatred, Canada’s federal bonds are frayed and close to snapping in many areas. While our pandemic response has far surpassed the Americans’ feeble, simpering, weepy privileged attempts to curb the spread of COVID-19, we are also finding ourselves falling into the worst bout of it yet. We’re a long way from being out of the woods yet resolve in Canada to fight the virus seems to be waning toward selfishness and ignorance in many areas, much like our southern cousins.
What happens in the next few weeks, as votes are counted in America, will lead to clearer roads for Americans and Canadians.
This crossroad we’re at – complete with British Columbia’s own recent reckless election, thanks to Premier John Horgan seizing a moment of weakness to strike with a heavy advantage (keep that rural/urban divide in mind), has all of us slowing to a stop to mark the occasion and hope for the best.
Add the rankling presence of this damned pandemic and its countless impacts far beyond the virus itself to this crossroads tarry and we find ourselves in the most delicate of places.
Our dystopian now pauses, too, as the world, not just America, awaits the results of this election.
Will it be four more years of Donald Trump? While perhaps beneficial for the stock exchange, that will slide America into civil war as thug terrorist organizations, which like to consider themselves militia, gain access to the mainstream, completing America’s descent into full-blown fascism. We will look at our still-closed border with a different eye then.
Or will Joe Biden, preaching unification and humility, have the presence to capture the hearts and minds of rational Americans who are aware of the con game Trump has been playing, as well as independents and Democrats? One only has to consider the large number of Republicans who have declared they will vote for Biden, to realize how bizarre and vital this election is.
The sitting president seeks to divide and rend; he is a fascist dictator wannabe who is addicted to golf, avarice, prevarication, adulation and chaos. As president he has openly attacked state governors and he has set the stage for what could become America’s darkest hours.
The challenger, while doddery, seeks to force his way through a blizzard of B.S., much sprayed by witless worshippers of Q and embraced as ‘fact’ by National Enquirer reading wrestling fans (see also: Trumpites). Joe Biden is America’s best and only hope of turning to face itself and re-embrace the fact that its social differences and varieties are what has made it great. Biden says he will be president for all Americans. Trump is the president of one; himself.
Americans have always needed an enemy for its population to focus on together, be they communists in southeast Asia, Russians, or various residents of mostly Muslim nations. That diversion has kept the fringe nut biscuit right and left wingers from tucking into one another.
In Trump’s four years as president, the enemy has become other Americans and they are tucking into one another in nasty ways not seen since the civil war and western expansion.
It seems easy to pick a direction, here at this crossroads. I believe Americans are better than they’ve shown he past few years; they’re more united than it seems and that will carry Biden to 270 plus electoral college votes. Then again, I thought Hillary Clinton was going to make soup out of Trump in 2016. So what do I know?
What I do know is we need peace and calm; we need lower blood pressures; we must stop turning on one another like petulant brats on a school bus. I for one dream of not having to see and hear Trump blithering on like a deranged cake-stuffed buffoon. I would also love to not feel compelled to write about the fetid cadmium carpetbagger.
At a time when we, the greater we – as in the world – must work together for the sake of our species’ collective benefit, we’re withdrawing and recoiling and lashing out at one another.
We must re-discover the joys of agreeing to disagree and stop all this discourteous asshole behaviour that is now the norm, in Canada as well as America.
It’s time for all of us to grow up a little bit.
So, come on America; show the world you’re not a vindictive, spiteful shrew that covets the ‘me me me’ over the ‘we’ (boy does that equate to our leader, too, eh?). Show the world that we can begin to trust you again.
We need you buddy. Quit being such a whiney turd and get back on your feet and cast aside the chains of your past which continue to weigh you down.
– Ian Cobb is owner-editor of e-KNOW and he is also the leader of a world-wide cult of journalists who, despite language barriers, vast distances, a complete lack of funding or a budget, have become a cabal working to dupe the entire planet about a wide range of nasty things. And yes, Bill Mahr really is Q!
