So last night, I was watching news footage of a riot at a Trump rally that was spiraling out of control.
And from the other side, we've been getting things like this for quite a while now.
It's been a while, since I've seen the country like this--that is to say, this violently divided, all sides just aching to break loose and wreck shit up.
Anyone ever hear of a guy named David Alexander Johnston?
image
His claim to fame was that he was the volcanologist posted six miles away from Mt. St. Helens at a monitoring station in 1980. He was the first to realize the volcano was erupting, and his last words were, "Vancouver, Vancouver--this is it!" The picture up there was taken 13 hours before his death when the mountain blew up pretty much in his face.
I'm starting to understand how he felt, in the later few seconds right before he was buried under a lateral eruption.
I've said before that I sort of had that "Germany, December 1932" feeling. Well, as time goes on, I feel more and more like we're all watching a volcano getting ready to pull a Krakatoa, and we're sitting on lawnchairs on the crater rim. And even if he loses, Trump has tapped into so many decades' worth of venom, hate and barely repressed fury about pretty much everything from 1865 until now from the Fox News Generation that it might not have anywhere safe to go. That mountain might wind up blowing up in all of our faces no matter what the outcome of the election happens to be.
It's making me really uneasy. And I really, really hope I'm wrong. This isn't something I want to be right about.