The Big Chill

 There is something about this picture, which I snapped looking out our kitchen window on a -12 degree morning, which seems to completely capture my mood at the moment. I mentioned in a post the other day that I was essentially at my nadir in response to living in Calais, but which I proposed had much more to do with my larger feelings of unhappiness about living in the US. This week Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, and immediately set about destroying the few things t he didn't destroy in his first term. He is an ignorant, mean-spirited, racist sociopath, elected by a nation increasingly made up of ignorant, mean-spirited, racist sociopaths. In the past I've tried to cut the people who voted for him for more, as in, they didn't really understand the enormity of the damage they were doing. However, I don't think that's true. They know that he's not actually going to  lower the price of groceries - and even the most clueless has to understand, at least on some level, that decisions such as withdrawing from the Paris climate accord are going to make for a much worse life for their grandchildren - but those things pale in comparison to the ability at this moment to inflict cruelty on people of color and Jews and Muslims and immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community. As was often pointed out in the first Trump administration, the cruelty is the point. Now it's the overriding point, nothing else matters. Trump needs to go fuck himself, and the same goes for everyone who voted for him - and if you sat out the election you're equally as guilty. We have reached a tipping point, and while America may someday be a democracy that stood for something, it won't be in my lifetime.

The sun is rising in the east and that does promise better days, of course, Portugal is in the east. Janet and I spent most of Monday running around and staying as far away from the news as possible. Not surprisingly, we devoted a lot of time to discussing an eventual, sooner than later, to Europe.