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Election Day Brings Dreams of Escape [1]

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Date: 2024-11-05

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.

Today is November 5, 2024. Election Day. What is there even to say? Nothing original or new, that’s certain.

I had a dream last night that I was walking down a road that was under construction. In the opposing lane, a steadily increasing stream of animals walked past me. First I saw tortoises, their massive shells indicating an age much greater than my own. They were joined by even larger reptiles, ones I’ve never seen: a huge, land-roving crocodile-like beast ambled by; a long-necked velociraptor-looking creature nodded at me. What could only be called an albino tyrannosaurus rex lumbered past. I kept walking.

These past few months have felt like both the longest and shortest election season of my life. This makes sense: this is the first presidential election in which I have been a reporter, meaning I thought more about politics than I ever have. And it was short because of how recently Kamala Harris stepped into the race – I still remember exactly where I was, down to the very food I was eating, when I learned President Joe Biden would not seek a second term.

Besides the Democratic presidential nominee shake out, there have been so many other shocking events this election: not one but TWO assassination attempts on Donald Trump, two decidedly rural (albeit in very different ways) vice presidential candidate picks, and more election-related internet jokes than I’ve ever seen (even more than when that fly that landed on Mike Pence’s forehead).

There’s a particular flavor I’ve been associating with this election, a salty and fermented, slightly crazed taste coming from both sides of the aisle. In Republicans, it’s an excitement about their beloved leader’s possible rise once again; in Democrats, it’s an existential dread about what might happen under another Trump administration. Both sides feel deranged to me.

I’ve been thinking more and more about what the future might hold regardless of whether it’s a Harris or Trump presidency. I don’t often ascribe meaning to my dreams, but last night’s felt prescient. At the end of the road, an enormous airplane sat idling. “Get in,” the pilot said, looking at me and, unbeknownst to me until then, a long line of other people behind me.

In front of the plane was a valley, one I recognize from a painting in my childhood home. A river ran through it and on its banks lay the bodies of a thousand dying animals, wolves and bison and even an albino tyrannosaurus rex. “We’re leaving,” the pilot said. That’s when I woke up.

A thought experiment I like to mull on is whether I would leave Earth to start a new world if given the option. The friends I’ve posed this question to have mixed opinions: some say they would jump on the opportunity to start society afresh, others fear the spaceship wouldn’t even make it to Mars before exploding. I’m of the opinion that if we’ve left our world in such disarray that we need to leave it in order to survive, we don’t deserve a second chance.

This entire election has felt like a sick thought experiment. Whatever the result, I’m not sure anyone wins. I just know that whatever does happen, there will be much more work to do come Wednesday.

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