Trump Redux

So… Trump again. Honestly, I don’t know how we survive this. Survive as a planetary civilization, survive as democracies, or even how I survive personally. I just don’t know how to gather the energy to live through this.

Elegies

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
— WH Auden, “Funeral Blues”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
— Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

For those who somehow thought this election not important enough to vote, we invite your consideration:

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” – Plato, Republic, Book 1, 347c.

As EB White wrote in an essay in The New Yorker on 1944-Jul-03 (later collected into On Democracy in 1947):

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

This is the other half of the time: half of us are proudly ignorant and venomously racist.

I don’t quite see, yet, how the rest of us can survive that.