A Pivot Point in Western History

Like the Kennedy Assassination and 9/11, this is one of those days when you'll remember exactly what you were doing when you heard the news that Donald J. Trump who has Covid, is boarding a helicopter to Walter Reed Hospital.

The unsurprising, yet surreal event is the latest and largest of a series of shocks that have roiled this country since his election, no less the last three-to-four weeks. This seminal event, the boomerang of Karma on a president hellbent on denying reality, on whipping up a set of self-serving fictions about a pandemic that have cost 210,000 Americans their lives (as of this writing() exists against a backdrop of truly cataclysmic developments, any one of which would have defined an era.
Here's where thing stand as of October 2, 2020:

• The most crucial election in since the Civil War is 32 days away
• ​Domestic White Supremacy is the biggest threat to our security according to multiple government and private experts who track such thing. More than al Qaeda, ISIS, Antifa or any left wing group.
• The stock market has rocketed while more than 50 million people remain unemployed, 100,000's of business have been permanently shuttered, along with major brands like J.Crew, Neiman Marcus
• California has been on fire for three weeks, with more than 6 million acres burned and no end in sight.
• Russian collusion has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and is still roiling the 2020 election
• There are unprecedented and comprehensive Republican voter suppression efforts, ranging from crippling the Post Office, eliminating ballot drop boxes, scraping voter rolls, establishing doubt in the integrity of the election through robocalls, and worst of all, calling for armed militia to patrol polls to intimidate people from voting.

Hard to believe, given today's news, these are secondary considerations.

What's primary is the continuing, willful destabilization of our societal norms and rule of law. Use of the White House as a partisan prop for a wanna-be Mussolini, Untruthful health status statements. Internal truth vs public truths. Russian-borne conspiracy theories ending up as "facts" in Senate investigations. The invective and sneering dismissal of expertise and the transformation of opponents into mortal enemies. There is a concerted effort by Trump to overthrow our democracy is not some wild conjecture. There is no objective analysis of the facts that leads to any other conclusion. None.

Now, with Trump getting the plague, the wrench of truth gets thrown into this toxic mix, flattening the Grifter-in-Chief and Putin's most precious useful idiot. Thirty-two days away from Election Day. Yet the nagging feeling that the worst is yet to come persists. The polarities can't be resolved by dialogue or finding common ground. It's going to explode because it has to. This is an historical imperative, much like the ones that have driven fascist movements in Europe. The only question is how will it be ignited?