Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Yesterday was a pretty dark day.

A narcissistic, compulsive liar, sexual predator, Russian conspirator was sworn in to the most powerful office in the world. Reports on the ground of his inauguration crowd read like the worst combination of a convention of gamergaters, MRA's, Neo-Nazis and delusional desperate people clinging to the hope that their red hatted messiah will help save them from the scary foreign boogeymen that they are eager to blame for their misfortunes.

Immediately, the words "climate change", "LGBT rights", "Civil Rights" were scrubbed from the whitehouse.gov website, letting us know exactly where this new administration almost exclusively run by straight white men for straight white men stands. In his first executive order as President, Donald Trump has made clear his intention to repeal the Affordable Care Act while having no idea of what to replace it with.

30 million Americans will lose their health insurance, all so the Republican Party can take a petty, vindictive swipe at the man who spent 8 years trying to fix what they had destroyed over the previous 30.

Very rarely do we stand on the precipice of history, knowing full well that the world is going to change tomorrow. I tend to be a optimist when it comes to the progress we are capable of in a short period of time. I always hope that tomorrow will be the day that the next big scientific discovery is made, or the next positive step to a more inclusive and diverse society. Yesterday, however, I had the inescapable feeling that the world was about to change for the worse.

So, that's all pretty terrible.

Then I woke up this morning to a twitter feed filled with pictures of hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets of Washington for the Women's March. Making minuscule by comparison the sad, angry, ghost town that was the Inauguration (which will forever eat away at the new thin skinned President, that he couldn't even get half the audience that Obama did). The images yesterday of empty bleachers juxtaposed with images of packed city streets today give me hope. Millions more are marching around the world in solidarity. As the pictures came in, not just in American cities like Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Lexington, Austin, Los Angeles, NYC but also in far flung places like Dublin Ireland, Cape Town South Africa and even an exploring expedition in Antarctica. So many places, it's hard to keep up.

Donald Trump and his sad little cult of followers do present a real threat to the progress that has been made in the past century. An angry, bitter group of resentful bigots have managed to to find their way into the White House. Amoral, sociopathic, bought and paid for Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell (I'm ashamed to share a first name with that owl faced asshole) present a real threat. A supreme court seat sits open due to the GOP's pettiness. The incoming Trump administration is chock full of conflicts of interests, conspiracy nuts, ethical violations, white supremacists and cronies who bought their way in so they could re-write the rules in their favour.

The next 4 years are not going to be easy, but today gave me hope that they will not be easy for the forces or regression and intolerance.

We've made too much progress to go backwards. Time moves ahead. Old ideas die out and many tomorrows from now I hope we look back on today as the turning point when we stood up to forces of fascism and said "Never again."

PS: Seeing Neo-Nazi prick Richard Spencer get punched yesterday made the day slightly better.