Yes.

In my opinion we’ve already passed the point of no return and recent events have just confirmed as much.

This isn’t about having differing political opinions. A profoundly unfit, amoral criminal with a very public history of being an awful person came along and started spewing extremely dangerous rhetoric, some of which is almost verbatim to Hitler’s, and our society ate it up and made him president in 2016. This man, who leads a party who courts racists/sexists for their votes, utterly failed his tenure as president, bombing his response to the greatest American crisis since WW2 and presiding over the highest White House administration turnover rate in U.S. history. Since then he has become a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and illegally attempted to overturn our democratic institutions by various means.

This go around the American people were presented with a choice between that person, who only managed to make himself appear even more unfit during this campaign season, openly stated he is anti-worker rights, and is directly responsible for removing women’s federally protected right to bodily autonomy, or a successful prosecutor with a doctorate in law, backed by a party that, despite misinformation, has a voting history proving they vote in favor of the average American FAR more than the opposing party…and Americans STILL managed to drop the ball and go with the CLEARLY worse choice. And when I say clearly, I’m talking about by every conceivable metric that exists in reality.

At this point it isn’t about Democrat vs Republican or Trump vs Kamala or Biden. It’s about the American people. We are not a society of intelligent voters. We have failed our responsibility as citizens in a democracy by being too lazy to learn and by allowing misinformation to mislead us and emotions to cloud our better judgement. We are not engaged in responsible involvement in our own politics. We gleefully elect people that only offer hate and fear and lies, despite how hard they try to prove how awful they are to us. And THAT is why we have passed the point of no return. If you remove the parties and the politicians out of the equation, you still have a society that fails at responsibly preserving a democracy. That gives in to hateful rhetoric and fear. That wants to get the better of the “others”.

There is no happy ending for a society like that. A society like that can only decline. This was not an election about one political ideology against another. It was an election about morality. And we categorically failed that moral test.

There are excuses. We’ve been through a lot. Lots of people are desperate. Desperate people make bad decisions. But the bottom line is we don’t live in a society with a majority of responsible adults making responsible, fact-based decisions about the most important things.

In the arc of history we may end up reaching a better place, but personally I believe we’re embarking on a decline that will most likely last the rest of our lives. It simply isn’t a problem that can be fixed short term. And we’re about to experience a sort of deconstruction. A deconstruction of norms. A deconstruction of institutions. A deconstruction of education and safety nets. And those things take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to build back, because it’s easier to destroy than it is to create or maintain.

Buckle up. Try to find happiness where you can. It’s probably not getting better anytime soon.