Memories of 2016

The news from South of the Border (yes, that's you, US of A) now operates exclusively in a rhetorical mode I'd call "the premature superlative." Each day, an "-est" blares out from the news — the cruelest, the dumbest, the meanest, the rudest, something — and each day's tomorrow reveals that in fact that day's news wasn't the cruelest, the dumbest, the meanest or the rudest, that the new day's news is in fact worse, that the bottom (if there is a bottom) is deeper than anyone had suspected and that people are worse than anyone feared.

Sitting here north of the border, the horror show is unbearable to watch (but who can look away) and terrifying to think about. When Doug Ford swept the Ontario elections, I felt doomed, felt that the madness was infectious. Where the States goes, so goes the world. Or so it seemed.

It's tough now to read the bleakness and resignation of my summer 2016 post on Trump's prospects without wondering if, despite my careful hesitations and hedges, something in me understood my own family enough to know what was going to happen in that Fall's election. Reading now with hindsight, I sound like a drowning man looking up at the small circle of sky visible through the water's surface hoping to see a hand reaching down to pull him to safety.

Which brings me to Pride Month and the campaign image Hillary posted in celebration two years ago: her logo colored as a rainbow flag. I first posted it that same summer. I’m posting it again now because the idea that a presidential candidate—any candidate—actually circulated it seems like something pulled from a utopian fiction. After all, in the time since I first posted it, we've learned that I don't even have the right to order cake anymore. I mean I can order and maybe get one if I'm lucky, but it's not me who decides.

That's where the States are today, and it's sick-making to think about it.