2020 has been a year of contemporaneous contemplation hanged by the bridle of dismay. We have been forced to leap from the cliff, together, Zombie-like, from crisis to crises. We drowned in foolish Tweet after Tweet and now, as a new horizon presents itself to us for celebration, and referral in 2021, we cannot stop but to hope against the losses we served, and the punishments we received, over the last four years.

The 2020 election turned on one thing and one thing only: Republicans split their vote! Republican voters repudiated Donald Trump by voting for Joe Biden and then voting the remainder of their ballot for any remaining Republican.

The election fraud that Donald Trump hoped to uncover never existed because the betrayal of him is from his own Republican voters, not via the fiat of Democrat finagling. Yes, Trump lost GOP-ers who claimed to love him in public, but who then voted behind his back — and stabbed him there! — by choosing Joe Biden in the dark safety of the anonymous voting book. That’s what the numbers tell us. Trump lost his own Deplorables and he is too umbrellaed to realize he was tossed over by his own constituency.

Ah, the beauty of the democratic process at work!

As we try to move beyond 2020, we will be pulled back into the lies of disremembering and disassembly of those who supported Trump, without contempt, and they will all try to flip that around on us in 2021. There will be denials. There will be lack of advocacy for what once was the law of the land. There will be new “Never Trumpers” who will falsely claim all along they were working against him from the inside to protect the freedoms of our nation. Do not believe them. They are lying.

Yes, the GOP will turn on Trump the moment he is out of power — because beyond the presidency, Trump has no will or woe beyond himself. He can continue to blame others for his problems, but the ramifications of his treachery as a person will come back to haunt him, and his family, for the rest of their lives. The mark of the MAGA is brilliant and everlasting. There’s no excuse for what they did to us, and the best way to fight them in the future is to never allow them to disavow their past in any now or then.

We also have a reconciliation problem in America. Republicans are not interested in working with Democrats. Democrats have no use for the beloved authoritarianism of the GOP. How does one excise more than 70 million Americans voting to live under a dictatorship all while crying freedom, disavowing vaccines, and waving flags? The irony of their ribald fantasy pitted against the oppressed truth is completely lost on them.

I don’t know how that split can be healed; few on either side of the divide are interested in becoming one nation again, because to heal you have to become your enemy — if not for just a little bit — to understand where they’re coming from and what they want. There is little interest in a liberal becoming a MAGAnut and zero want in a MAGA lover sharing mindspace with democrat idealism.

So, where do we go from here? Do we remain divided? Do we choose to live in the realm of fantasy that we all get along without even considering each other? Well, if so, time is on the blue side, because the red anglers can only manage their inequity and hatreds for so long until they are overwhelmed, and outnumbered, by more reasonable, younger, immigrant, minds. Over the long arc of time, the population vote will overwhelm the minority attempt to repress.

Time always tells. Seconds always tattle. Change will explode with every new breath. A nation heals by sloughing off the dead and embracing the newborn. We just have to be patient, and prescient, while forcing the will of the people back against the egos of the misbegotten.

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