Really appreciate your reading and replying, Mike Meyer. The vision you describe is one that haunts me; I wonder what will happen on the day after election day. A reader wrote a letter to The Progressive magazine saying that, as soon as a Dem is elected president, Repubs (or whichever category into which he places himself) are going to take up arms and incite a Civil War redux.

For sanity purposes, I’m trying to train my mind away from such fears…while living, for the first time in my life, as if there might not be much time left for any of us.

God, is this bleak. Yikes.