Once upon a time in a college political science class, we debated the future of America and the world. We came up with an idea that world war three would involve a mostly free and democratic planet taking on a fascist United States. The class, with a conservative professor, figured America’s high economic status and powerful military were a volatile mix that would lead to out-of-control narcissism. The US was only one tyrant wannabe president away from using our military to bully the rest of the world so we could maintain our economic superiority during a period of austerity.

As time moved on, that idea became improbable if not naive. The reality is that another world war wouldn’t be so much nation against nation but a worldwide civil war — compatriots against each other, brother against brother — the haves versus have-nots. In this scenario, the ego-maniacal president would convince enough have-nots (or have-somes) that they could become haves if only they weed out other have-nots. The military would then be used against the undesirables to round them up and force them into greater subservience. Meanwhile, the haves would only get richer.

This seems to be where the world is now, devolving into a civil war while rich men get richer.

This highbrow approach to the latest election is just me intellectualizing to disconnect from the feelings it brings up. Going back to the time of my university career, there were also family patterns of behavior to suss out. One counselor told me that my siblings would never see the real me and never truly accept me. The best thing to do for my future was to stop expecting them to celebrate my creativity or unique self. They would always cast their ‘little brother’ as ‘other’ or ‘crazy’ or ‘less than’ as they sought their fortunes in the world.

So by-and-large I left family behind as far as my self-esteem goes, but I also tried to accept them as they expressed themselves. This often meant looking past religiosity and grandiosity as needed to keep the occasional family gathering from getting out of hand. This worked mostly okay until the rise of Trump followed by his feeble-minded handling of the pandemic. There were family patterns running in the shadows; we were all too far down our irrespective roads in life to un-mind the gap between us.

During the pandemic, my brother posted something on social media filled with false information disparaging ‘liberals’. I made a comment about being disappointed in seeing false information being spread online. This drew out an attack from a militant Trumpster friend of his who wrote the diatribe — his dubious online name ending in ‘prick’. My brother egged him on, apparently not knowing or caring that I was out of work as a tech writer who checks facts. After a brotherly phone call with a mea culpa, he went back online and egged on the ‘prick’ again; my brother’s friend told me “we are sick of people like you.”

It occurred to me that a ‘prickly’ Trumpster was considered more of a ‘brother’ to my brother than me. All that looking beyond my brother’s hyper-religiosity and conservative christian nonsense had gone unrecognized. He had never made an effort to know me or accept me. And now he was so far down his road that he had a militant right winger denouncing me instead of doing it himself. It wasn’t exactly surprising; it fulfilled what that counselor had said to me all those years ago. The feelings of long ago were still there too, connected to this election and other past family patterns.

Some years earlier, again during the time of my university career, my brother had reached out to me to go see an old friend from the neighborhood who lived near the inner harbor of Baltimore. A few beers into our evening, the friend started asking questions straight out of a psych eval. I played along thinking it was some kind of joke with a punchline coming. None ever arrived, nor did any explanation of the odd conversation. My brother had apparently fallen for something my sister had yelled at me during an argument. Was there a family conspiracy to get me committed? My unusual narrative ability and visual imagination was akin to ‘schizophrenia’ in their minds. My uniqueness and advanced education was ‘craziness’ worthy of a secret (and illegal) plot to diagnose me. I never heard anything more about that, so I guess I passed the test.

Back to the present. What American elections are really about is something called ‘magical thinking’. Many people believe that a politician will deliver a better world in line with their beliefs even though there’s no logical way their promises can achieve what they say. The politicians brand themselves as saviors during an election; yet we all should know that the ‘magic’ they proffer won’t actually happen. What they’ve done is connected themselves to feelings inside of us from past let-downs or traumas. If our politician wins, we get to keep these feelings repressed and forgotten. If they lose, we might fall into a pit of despair ruminating the past. A barrage of seemingly unconnected feelings surfaces because most people don’t have five million words in journals and an ongoing narrative memory to understand where those feelings come from like I do.

Call me crazy.

Did hatred win? It appears a tyrant wannabe won the latest election. What else might the ridiculous process have produced? It seems we’re at a place where many people want to get rid of the checks and balances of a democracy so that we never have to correct our errors or face our demons. We can force our demons on others and exorcise them from our world, leave them outside the wall with the gnashing of teeth.

The best anyone can really hope for in a politician is that they keep the world from going to shit when the inevitable crisis comes. Hopefully, when the troubles come, our elected officials do what’s best for the world and not just for themselves and their rich donors. The notion that a politician is divine or sent by a god and will save us while making everything better is truly magical thinking. The most we might hope from government is that it stays out of our way as we try to create a better world — and maybe it supports those efforts.

If you find yourself cheering for a person to beat others down and raise you up, then maybe hatred has won in your life. As for me, I sometimes feel the haters won in my life, but I still try to be kind to others.