Catastrophe has finally been prevented, and the 10-ton weight of the last four years has lifted off my chest. We have a functional executive branch again, skillfully taking bold, swift action to help The People. So why do I still feel troubled?

I need to focus on positive things AND I need to go back to my policy of not watching or reading the news beyond a brief scan. Anything past that pulls me down toward hopelessness again.

After all we’ve been through the last 4 years, it crushes my heart to hear the harmful nonsense still emanating from the Fox-addled mob, sucked blindly for decades into an anger-generated bubble of misinformation, dogma, and anti-intellectualism, closed up tight against science-based changes in government, where a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself, sink-or-swim, zero-sum, anti-humanist mindset is embraced as virtuous.

Attempts to use humanist-oriented government as a tool to directly assist people with life’s difficulties, to make changes that create progress toward justice and universally increased wellbeing, bring out the figurative pitchfork mob who circle angrily around the hated unknown, torches thrust forward, outraged shrieks of “Marxist!” (by people who probably know very little about actual Marxism) mingling with the crackle of the fire at the feet of the heretic scientists, scholars, historians, protesters who dare question the status quo. I hope these people, will grow wiser somehow and abandon GOP mythology and the resulting skewed ideology.