Well, as the returns come in, it looks like folks votes can be summed up in two words:

Fuck Hope.

Lots of people voted, but those are the folks who always vote. Lots more people didn’t. Lots more people have seen that they can work hard, try to do the right thing, try to get their kids through school, try to get through life without watching their sons and daughters get shot in the street or even in their own classrooms, and really, it doesn’t matter. The game is rigged. White guys with money built the machine with stolen labor, trained us to believe that its the only machine that works, and that we all have an equal shot at prosperity, although they have quietly set fire to most of the ladders that would allow any of us not born into that wealth to have access to it.

A small angry White Male minority with lots and LOTS of cash to spend mobilized a small number of angry poor and Lower-Middle Class White men to go to the polls and completely forget their best interests and vote for the guys who said you don’t need unemployment assistance. Medical insurance companies have the right to screw you into the ground, and you have the right to say, “more please, Sir.” You have the right to be terrified by corporations into neglecting your family and friends to work unreasonable hours in hopes that you might get a tiny raise and maybe take 2-3 days vacation out of the 3 to 6 weeks of it you’ve earned. You have the right to eat un-labeled poison in your food, to drink un-labeled poison in your water. To breathe air that has whatever the fuck they feel like pumping into it in order to make a profit.

What you think you voted for was “To Win.” To belong to the winning team, because someday, you’ll be rich. Mmmm hmmm. Someday you’ll win the lottery, or a big piece of equipment will fall on you at work, or you’ll be hit by a truck and survive it and that payday will come and you’ll be rich.

Or you’ll eventually develop a debilitating disease that will take your house, your money, and your life and leave your family enslaved with the debt. Its a lot more likely this is the path you’re on.

But that doesn’t matter, right. Because you’ve won. Right?

Because now the President who killed Osama bin Laden, saved this country from the second Great Depression, got laws passed that say the insurance companies have to actually give you care in exchange for all the money they take from you, tried to close Guantanamo, but was stopped in his tracks by fear and cowardice on both sides of the aisle, got the unemployment rate down, even though now companies are doing their best to sabotage it in order to keep you in fear and clinging to the job that you despise, and to avoid paying any of those pesky Gays and Lesbians any benefits for marriage (yeah, check amongst your older gay friends in key states and see how many of us recently got laid off…). Yeah, it was more important to not allow that guy any more gains or successes. It was so important that you just picked up a rusty jagged nail and jammed it in your own foot.

Congratulations.

I have a few predictions for you.

Mitch McConnell will defund Obamacare.
Mitch McConnell will submit budgets and laws that will be completely unsignable by the President.
Mitch McConnell will not approve a Surgeon General or any other necessary Cabinet position.
Mitch McConnell and John Boehner will file articles of Impeachment against the President.
The Government will go into Shut Down.
We will go into Great Depression 2.0.
It will take the country 20 years to dig out of it.
We may wind up going to War with Russia if we don’t wind up in an un-winnable ground war with Dash/ISIS/ISIL/Whatever the fuck those brainwashed hopeless angry bastards have been led to believe, but they too are part of a “winning team.”  Yay team. yay.
Your sons will die on foreign soil.
Ebola will kill people.
The Flu will kill more people.
Diseases long thought defeated will come back due to foolishness from Anti-Vaxxers.

Hillary Clinton will be our next President, but it won’t matter because the local elections and midterms where the things that really matter to most Americans get decided will continue to lose the interest of regular folks, and incredibly stupid Social Conservatives will continue to quietly consolidate their power.

Some major bridges and infrastructure will fail due to underfunded Transportation funds because Congress won’t raise a petroleum or carbon tax to create revenue to fix them. People will die on those bridges or in those tunnels.

They’ll blame Obama, but some of us know its the guys in Congress and specifically those idiots with rusted nails hanging out of their own feet who are and will be responsible for the downfall of this country.

The sun will set on the United States of America and it will rise on India, on Bangladesh, on China, on wherever the company’s  journey chasing the brass dragon to the lowest wage workers takes them.

Companies will get richer. The rich will get richer. They will get old. They will die.

The sons of the rich will not die on foreign soil. They will die in plush hotel rooms, choking on their own vomit with needles hanging from their arms.

There may be a Revolution, but it won’t be the kind where White People with big guns win the battle. Why? Because the dumbasses with guns haven’t figured out yet that you need the rest of us to feed you, clothe you, keep your lights on and your cars running, and buy and sell the bullshit pretend food and tainted water you had shipped in from wherever the brass dragon landed in order for you to stay “rich.”  You might shoot a few more of us, and then find that we stop showing up to work. We stop driving your trucks. We stop wiping your mom’s ass in the nursery homes.

We might begin to realize that all of the bullshit stops if all of the rest of us watching your temper tantrums just decide to STOP EVERYTHING.

Do I have a solution to this problem?

No.

Am I at the point where I’m thinking if it all burned to the ground and we had to start over, it might be a good thing?

No.

I was there, but my reasonable side is thinking that maybe I need to calm the fuck down and see what the morning brings, and take pride in the fact that the People of Pennsylvania at the very least did not re-elect the man who slow-walked the Sandusky investigation, enabling a child molester to continue damaging at-risk young men who were in a program hoping for a fresh start, and what they got was a wrinkly old White dick shoved into their asses in a secluded Penn State Football shower.

Will things look better in the morning?

Perhaps.

But probably not.

But it may be time to find a few wrenches and start taking apart that machine. It might be time to start drafting some plans to build a new machine, or dust off some of the old plans that still work and start some of the old dusty machines back up.

Those machines go by many names but there’s one I prefer:

Union.