New Years is in a few days, and, traditionally, this is a time in which we look back upon the year with remembrances of events significant. I’ve occasionally thought of writing a post about my favorite posts of the year, but that always seemed too self-indulgent to me. However, I want to reflect upon the year that was and speculate about the year that will be.

Looking back at the year, I am reminded of what I thought about it at the beginning of the year. A year or less ago, I sat at this very computer typing and tapping and scratching my ass and thinking, 2019 would be the year that norms fought back. Looking back at it, it seems I was right. Most significantly, we’ve impeached the motherfucker to borrow from Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D – Shero of the Resistance).

So, why didn’t I publish it last year? I rue each and every day that I decided not to announce that 2019 was the year that norms fought back! I KNEW it would be the year of impeachment. I KNEW it would be the year that the tide turned against old white men running the country. I KNEW it would be the year that the disaffected disappointing disinterested independent voters would start paying attention and tire of the chaotic lying mess that the Ol’ Pussy Grabber has created.

You see, I KNEW it.

All the lying and corrupting and undercutting of our government, its institutions, its laws, its traditions that were changing the normative behavior of our politics is being rejected by a wider and wider swath of our populace. In a sense, it is regression to the mean. We are returning to something nearer to what we were. Unfortunately, damage has been done, and we are coarser and more divided than ever before. In that sense it was predictable. Although, we will probably never get to the halcyon days of Old Handsome Joe’s imaginings when he and strident racists rode unicorns, held hands, ate heart-shaped cupcakes, and sang Kumbaya as they rode across rainbow bridges together.

Every year, you see, I had predictions and reflections on what was to come:

2017, the Great Civics Lesson!

2018, the New Cruelty

2019, the year that norms fought back!

2020, the year of perfect vision!

2017 The Great Civics Lesson

You can search up the Great Civics Lesson. I use it all the time, but especially in 2017 when I was posting about the 2016 election. We were all still in shock then. The six months or so after the election were surreal with many people trying to wake up from the national nightmare only to realize that it wasn’t all some bad dream. With some very wild craziness happening: the Muslim ban and a circus of cruelty in the nations international airports, the Ol’ Pussy Grabber welcoming Russian spies and spyware into the Oval office only to dish on national secrets, firing James Comey and setting the Mueller investigation into motion. Man, those days were so dizzying, they were nauseating.

How could this have happened, folks lamented. Yo! Voting matters! And, electoral college. That’s how it happened. Assholes stayed home because the fucking pea under their mattress kept them up at night. And, it didn’t matter that three million more Californians voted for Clinton. And, it won’t matter if all of the millions of Californians and New Yorkers vote for the Dem candidate in 2020, either. In 2020, the Dem candidate could have six million more votes than the Ol’ Pussy Grabber, and it won’t matter if we don’t carry the electoral college.

Part of the Great Civics Lesson was to remind us all of how democracy worked. All my life, I’d been told my vote didn’t matter; all politicians were the same; it didn’t matter who was in office, nothing ever changed for us little people. It turns out that was a pack of lies. Voting fucking matters.

2018 The New Cruelty

Then, in 2018, we saw wholesale destruction of our national norms as we became awash in racism, mass shootings, and White House mishegas. It was clear that we were living in the New Cruelty.

The entire point of our national political discourse seemed to be to own the libs and make the snowflakes cry and other utter meaningless bullshit.

At the national level, Congressional Repubes seemed about as interested in getting legislation done as they were when Obama was president. They were only interested in packing the courts with their ridiculously unqualified radically conservative judges like the infamous Boof K.

We progressives were left to cling to the hope that Mueller would publish his report and save us from the New Cruelty. We stood by screaming into the void about lawlessness and misbehavior as concentration camps were built along our border and children were stolen from their parents never to be returned to them for no better reason than sadistic incompetence.

2018 will forever stain our national soul.

2019 The Year Norms Fought Back

Just as the Ol’ Pussy Grabber has no bottom — okay, he has an enormous hairless white ass — but will always be able to go lower, there is a limit to the ability of the indifferent, inattentive, impassive independent voter to ignore the disaster that was occurring all around us. And, the Ukrainian call turned out to be the call heard round the country as it has slowly galvanized the populace.

Why was that call the one thing that seemed a bridge so far that the camel’s back broke trying to cross it? I don’t know, but all the cabinet officers’ lies and all the Russian propaganda can’t seem to put the genie back in the bottle again. No amount of William Barr-the-door’s dissembling and investigations of fake crimes can so obfuscate it that opinion won’t be solidly against him.

2020 A Year of Perfect Vision

2020 is the year of perfect vision, the year that we will see clearly and find our way back to some sense of normality. You know who is seeing clearest of all? Women. All of the crap that the Ol’ Pussy Grabber is spewing out of his orifices has pissed women off in a big way. Just when women thought it was safer to be a woman, we elect the Ol’ Pussy Grabber and seat Boof K on the Supreme Court! We will be riding the righteous anger of women through the 2020 elections and beyond.