“THE NATION IS NOT ABOUT TO FALL APART BECAUSE DONALD TRUMP HAD A FEELING”
A message of calm by
Robert Hawks
Every few days one of my friends messages me like I’m the last sane weatherman on the Titanic.
“He’s gonna cancel the election!”
“He’ll send troops to the polling places!”
“He doesn’t care about laws!”
“We’re doomed!!”
The internet has become a twenty-four-hour doom-porn buffet and half of America is stress-ordering emotional takeout at 3 a.m.
But let me say this clearly, loudly, and with my best grizzled Air Force veteran voice:
No, there will NOT be troops at polling stations.
It’s against federal law.
Full stop.
No footnote.
No secret clause.
No “but what if.”
If someone in an expensive suit tells a sergeant to go stand in front of a ballot box armed and intimidating, that sergeant says:
“Sir, that order is illegal. Hard pass.”
Trust me.
A lot of us took our oath to the Constitution like it was carved into the goddamn stone tablets at Sinai.
And at least half the military, maybe more, is allergic to Trump like he’s made of gluten, penicillin, and cheap self-tan.
Could a few rogue guys try it?Sure.
There’s always one corporal named Randy who thinks he’s living out Red Dawn.
But the idea of whole battalions goose-stepping into polling stations?
No.
The officers aren’t giving those orders.
They know the law, and they know the stakes.
If, hypothetically, they did give those orders?
Congratulations.
You’ve graduated from “America is stressed” to “America is over.”
And once a country hits that point, arguing about the odds becomes like debating the aerodynamics of a falling refrigerator.
The first step in breaking a nation is not tanks.It’s not troops.
It’s not coups.
It’s convincing enough citizens that collapse is inevitable.
When you believe the game is already lost, you stop playing.
You stop resisting.
You curl up on the couch and let the worst-case scenario move into the guest room and eat all your cereal.
Don’t give the bad actors the satisfaction.
YES, WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE, AND WE LIVED TO BITCH ABOUT IT
1968 America was basically a warehouse full of gasoline with a lit birthday cake inside.
MLK assassinated.
RFK assassinated.
Vietnam raging.
Cities on fire.
Mayor Daley running Chicago like a Bond villain.
Civil rights battles happening literally in the streets.
And on Christmas Eve, while the country held itself together with masking tape and bourbon, American astronauts read scripture while sending back the first pictures of Earth hanging in the black.
A tiny blue marble saying:
“Calm down, primates, you’re all on the same rock.”
1940’s fascists wanted to rule the world and exterminate entire peoples.
Today’s fascists are whining because they have to pay taxes.
Forgive me if I like our chances.
THE RICH ARE NOT ABOUT TO LET THEIR MONEY VANISH IN A CIVIL WAR
You know who isn’t signing up for America-the-Inferno?
People who own:
yachts
skyscrapers
vineyards
trust funds
gated communities with names like “Whispering Pines” or “Serf-Free Estates”
If the U.S. implodes and the dollar becomes as valuable as a Chuck E. Cheese token, guess who stops being rich?
And if you think the super-wealthy, Republican, Democrat, Martian, or otherwise, are going to sit back quietly while their money evaporates faster than a glass of water on Mercury, you’re kidding yourself.
You cannot be obscenely wealthy in a nation that has become a live-fire reenactment of Les Misérables.
Your gated community stops being a sanctuary and becomes… well… a destination for a certain kind of patriotic crowd-sourced redistribution event.
So no: the plutocrats are not going to let the country go full “French Revolution cosplay.”
They like their money.
They like their power.
They like not being chased down a driveway by 400 people with garden tools.
Stability is profitable.
Chaos is not.
Trump isn’t cancelling the election.
He isn’t sending troops.
He isn’t creating a dictatorship.
He can’t.
Not because he wouldn’t love to.
But because the machine is bigger than him:
federal law
governors
military command
courts
Congress
the Pentagon
literal billionaires who like the status quo
and 200+ million Americans who aren’t in the mood to let one guy rewrite the rules because his feelings got hurt online
If someone could end America single-handedly, Nixon would’ve tried.
So would Hoover.
So would half the tycoons in the Gilded Age.
But the American system, no matter how battered, bruised, dented, dented again, patched with duct tape, and occasionally held together by caffeine and spite, is surprisingly good at surviving idiots.
We are not doomed.
Not by this guy.
Not today.
Not because Facebook told you to panic.
SO TAKE A BREATH, SOLDIER
We’ve survived worse.
We’ve stared down uglier.
We’ve been closer to the edge than this and still managed to climb down, mop the sweat off our foreheads, and argue about baseball instead.
The republic isn’t made of glass.
It’s made of stubbornness, fury, hope, and the collective refusal to let one man, or one movement, or one tantrum rewrite the operating manual.
Keep your head.
Keep your humor.
Keep your resolve.
And if you absolutely must panic, at least do it stylishly.
— Rob from OCCASIONALITIES
Robert Hawks
