TMoRP – The US Election

I’ll level with you, this isn’t going to be easy.

It’s been a day where  the news coming out of America looks nigh impossible to put a positive spin on, if you’re anywhere near the centre-left of politics or like living in a world not dominated by the most repulsive people imaginable.

I thought about cheating:

Look, a cute distraction!

But running away doesn’t solve anything, does it?

Running away from human empathy. Running away from science. Running away from evidence-based analysis. Running away from basic human rights like education and healthcare and the right to relationships with the consenting adult of your choice.

If you run far enough, if you stretch logic and reality beyond a certain point, something snaps. Maybe something breaks.

Something snapped hard today, and maybe it’s broken. We won’t know for a while. (If we’re lucky we won’t know for a generation or two, but I think the reckoning will come a little sooner).

This is just the latest and loudest rubber-band snap in a series echoing around the world. Hearts are hardening. The cruel, the intolerant, the greedy and the authoritarian are emboldened by the noise, and they will lay claim to that which they crave and lay ruin to the rest.

Unless they are stopped.

Fifty years ago, give or take a couple of months, Patrick Troughton was finding his feet as the Doctor in his third story The Moonbase, in which the Cybermen lay siege to a lunar weather-controlling station. [1]

In a quiet moment, he had this to say: “There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things. Things which act against everything we believe in. They must be fought.”

This quote has stayed with me since I first read it, shortly after my eighth birthday. It made an impression. Over the years, I’ve filtered a lot of my personal morality through the Doctor. And, anarchic revolutionary provocateur that he is, I don’t think he’d stay on the sidelines in this timeline.

The terrible things were always there, but for a while we could hope the light would hold them at bay, make them too fearful to be seen for what they are. No longer. They have crawled from their corners in force, and under a figurehead with a propensity for charismatic bluster and opportunistic bullying, they have claimed a throne that should never have fallen into such hands.

It’s reasonable to argue that the Rise of the Great Pumpkin is not my monster to fight. I’m not American and I have no plans to visit. Hell, if their economy tanks, I might be able to buy my comics cheaply again.

But monsters beget monsters, and lend strength to darkness, and where one comes, others will surely follow. Here in Australia, we have our own species of pitiless brutes, venal curs and self-serving braggarts who revel in their blithe ignorance and shameless self-interest, who would happily grind down our spirits into shriveled and pitiless nubs until they match their own hollow, narrow worlds.

Those grimy mongrels are already stirring, licking their lips and baying in reflected glory. They know what happens there is always what will happen here next, and they celebrate that dark power’s rising.

I don’t know what I’ll do. Not yet. I don’t know what flag I’ll fly, what cause I’ll boost up on my shoulder, or what bulldozer I will stand in front of.

I’m not one for grand gestures, but I can’t be someone who does nothing.

They must be fought.

Of that, I am positive.

[1] It would be against the remit of this Relentless Positivity project to draw parallels between attacks by emotionless drone-remnants of functional members of human society on a science-based, internationally-cooperative project dedicated to the beneficial management of Earth’s climate, and anything that might occur in the real world.