Confused, dizzy, I cling to my pillow like flotsam not to drown.

Tomorrow, the election will be over. The die will have been cast, the consequences will be coming into view. Whatever occurs, we’ll be “moving on” into an altered world. But we will hardly fathom what happened – maybe ever. We the people, the most prosperous, materially successful, dominant nation in history, will have tiptoed to the brink of suicide and perhaps beyond. Why?

Revolutions, we are taught, happen for a reason. An oppressed underclass rises up.  Barbarians infiltrate. Ambition undermines an old regime. The story can be told. Having pondered America most of my adult life, feeling I understood us, at least sort of, I gaze at these events dumbfounded. Many Americans, perhaps a majority, preferred as their leader a person manifestly unfit – vile, vicious, verbose, erratic, cruel – advocating policies obnoxious to the majority – deplored by every informed and objective observer – whom no parent would hire to babysit their child or homeowner to mow their lawn – advocating havoc at home and with our allies – and promising to end to our two-and-a-half century experiment in self-government.

I grope for analogies as for a doorknob in the dark. Whatever humans do has been done before, plus or minus. No behavior, however weird, is wholly unprecedented. Does history recall a hale nation committing suicide? The Weimar Republic comes closest, when it selected Hitler, but they were a hard-up, hurting nation, with galling grievances and a calamitous economy. Hamelin’s Pied Piper perhaps, who piped a town’s children to their doom. Yes, nations, like people, have made stupid mistakes since the get-go, but ever so capriciously, with such scant attention to their risk?

I’m reminded of teenagers playing Russian roulette – out of boredom – for the thrill – prizing their lives but little – discounting the danger of death. They’re not thinking straight. Any change, they shrug, would be an improvement. Let’s shake things up.

How did America get so stupid?

Overconfidence, for starters. America would survive – we were too big to fail. So what if we chose wrong? No big deal.

Ignorance doubled our danger. Patriotic pedagogy persuaded us of our perfection. From pilgrims to founding fathers to pioneers to GI Joe, from Washington to Lincoln to FDR, a manifest destiny steered us infallibly; we were fated to succeed. No one warned us that all nations are fallible, frail, and eventually fail, even ours.

Absence of national purpose made us captious, careless. When was the last time America coalesced with zeal around a national goal? Our grandfathers had a Depression to combat, my dad Hitler. Who was my generation’s big bad wolf? Our own government. Our leaders brought us Vietnam, Watergate and all the other gates, pollution, corruption, rancor, to hell with them. “Without vision,” promises Proverbs, “the people perish.”

Brainwashing deepened our bewilderment. The rich persuaded us it was in all our interest for the rich to keep getting richer. They bought the multiplying information channels – and candidates – and judges.  They spooked us with negligible perils – abortions, immigrants, transgender rights, stolen elections – while minimizing real ones – the spoliation of the planet, proliferating weapons, etc. They even gulled the poor into opposing assistance to the poor.

What will save America from our sloth, waken us to our responsibilities as citizens, reacquaint us with our luck?

Fear. We need the hell scared out of us. Only burning teaches the force of fire. Only death alerts humans to the preciousness of life.     

The unseriousness of so many fellow Americans sickens me. I pray for us a wake-up call that doesn’t leave us all dead.