The last normal day in America

Saturday was a normal day in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The weather was typical for early November: high in the 50s which felt warmer because it was sunny with minimal wind. Tonight, it will be colder.

The University of Michigan football team played Oregon, currently ranked number one in the country, at the “Big House” — our famously large stadium. Predictably, Michigan lost. No one was surprised.

My wife and I went out for dinner during the game. As everyone learns in Ann Arbor, the most predictable thing about football Saturdays is that there is a slice of time when the town otherwise goes quiet. So it is an opportunity to go shopping, run errands, and avoid streets anywhere near the famously large stadium. That strategy worked for us. We were not harried.

Despite that, we live between anxiety and what psychologists call “anticipatory grief’ — mourning a loss that has not yet happened. Even as we pursue our everyday lives, we are aware that such normal days could be the last we know, at least for some time, and perhaps especially for us seniors who are already at the far end of life.

The election is coming, and it is never far from our awareness. While we cling to the hope that the vote will matter — and I still believe it will — we also know that whatever that outcome is, it is likely only the beginning of our last normal day. Partly to terrorize, partly to stay in the news, and partly to inspire those itching for violence, the Trump camp publicizes death threats that escalate daily. With thinly veiled rationales or no rationale at all, they celebrate crashing the economy, handing public health over to flagrant psychotics, initiating a reign of vengeance against whoever is their enemy du jour.

While these reactions would obviously be facilitated by actually winning the election, they have made it clear that the election — as we might have anticipated it on a past normal day — has nothing to do with their commitment to destruction. They have multiple ways to crash the vote. They have recruits ready to crush the resistance. It will begin with chaos. It will end with retribution — organized and lone-wolf violence. And, as in the usual euphemism, some sort of “cleansing” is anticipated to result.

Some believe that American habits of liberty and freedom will limit the mayhem. But the fact remains that those whose guns are locked and loaded are convinced they are the ones fighting for liberty and freedom — against the “deep state”: the privileged elite, and the menagerie of aliens, internationalists, kitten-eaters, baby-killers, blood-suckers, and all the other monsters whose end must come.

I get that many who read this in Israel will think otherwise. The polls there are clear enough. I will only say that, in this blog, I accurately predicted both the Trump victory in 2016 and the violence that would follow his removal in 2020. And I will predict here that Israel, and Jews in general, will be treated as just as disposable as everyone else. Maybe more so.

Today was the last normal day in America. There was football. There was grocery shopping. There was going out for a meal. The weather was normal for Michigan in early November.

The last normal day in America. Whatever the election results — and I am not pessimistic about those — it is the aftermath that threatens days like today. Normal days, I fear, that we are destined to grieve.