Out Of The Mire

That clicking sound you hear in the distance is Vladimir Putin tap dancing. He has to be. Any plan he might have had for destabilizing the government of the United States and its people could never have looked like this on the board. You know the one: with pins and strings of yarn connecting disparate elements all drawn together into one big webby mess. And while things continue to unravel over here, Vlad continues to dance and sing in his office while we try and imagine how things got to be the way they are.
Affairs with porn stars. Arguments with neighbors about how high the fence should be and who should pay for it. An Oval Office full of some of the scariest examples of nepotism since the Roman Empire. Thoughts and prayers issued twice weekly in the event of national catastrophe, most of which could be prevented. The denial of science. Enough hiring and firing to fuel a dozen seasons of The Celebrity Apprentice.
If we are to believe that it was a group of Russian hackers who found their way into our Facebook pages and instilled just enough doubt in our institutions that we began to question whether we should head in this new direction, then kudos to those Russian hackers. Buy them another case of Red Bull and some Doritos. Their work here is done. We are so busy pointing fingers at one another it is doubtful that we could find the time and energy necessary to push the button that would launch any sort of retaliatory attack on our Democracy.
And so what are we to do? Vote. Find common ground. Discuss among ourselves. What is it that we want our country to look like in 2018? Those clever Russian hackers forgot there is a secret reset button embedded in our system. Elections. Sure, there are millions of dead illegal immigrants voting in those rigged affairs, or not, but it is the thing that will carry us on. We have a chance to start picking up the pieces of a fractured nation. Soon. Until then, remember that we are all in this together, and like it or not, we will be for the foreseeable future. Turn off the television and stop reading your Twitter feed long enough to have that conversation with your cousin and try to figure out how it got this far out of whack. We are Americans, after all. It's what we do. We are also pretty good at tap dancing ourselves.