Nowhere

 I am not a big conspiracy guy. I tend to treat most coincidences as just that: coincidences. Rather than creating wall-sized bulletin boards with pictures and other bits of evidence stuck with color-coded stick pins and connected in some crazy web by lengths of yarn, I prefer to unravel these moments. Recently I have been met with a couple different people, both of whom I respect, who wanted to have me hop on board their funhouse ride to election fraud. Something, they insisted, was lurking out there after the presidential election. 

How could we all have been hoodwinked like this? Something was rotten.

I told them that I didn't find anything particularly conspiratorial about how things went down. After spending four years whining about how an election was stolen from him, the convicted felon was more than happy to accept the outcome of a process that handed him the ring of power. Without question. All the trash-talk and ridiculous stories that had been refined over those four years had borne fruit. Bitter fruit. The American electorate, or at least those who chose to participate in this last round, chose the Snake Oil Salesman instead of the woman who would prosecute him. That's not a conspiracy. That's just naive capitalism. A great slice of Americans would much rather believe that the problems of this country are the things over which they have no control. Without a shred of evidence that he could control any of these elements, the adjudicated rapist won the election. Which was all he really cared about in the first place. Being the man on top, very much like Yertle the Turtle, was his only real goal. Consolidation of his ego was the endgame, not unifying the country. 

The price of eggs? 

The war in Ukraine?

These things that he promised to fix "day one" have slipped off his desk to make room for the return of the button he presses to get Diet Coke brought to him. Meanwhile, out in the streets of America chaos is erupting as the "concepts of a plan" for the future of the country are rolled out. None of this is taking place behind a curtain. Just like the lies he told for four years about the fraud that kept him from being reelected in 2020. It's not conspiracy. It's your garden variety pack of lies. 

And we bought it. 

Okay, not every one of us, but enough to give this charlatan another shot at transforming our great nation into his own twisted image. Again: not a conspiracy, just a terrible terrible choice on the part of those who participated in the Democratic Process. 

Very frustrating. Very sad. For this version of the aforementioned bulletin board, you would just need one pin and one picture. And one big ball of yarn that leads nowhere.