The Dystopian Future is Here :-(

Although I hope I may be wrong. I'd LOVE to be wrong, really!! I never hoped so much in my life that I may be wrong about my gut feelings and impressions about "this man" and his upcoming "regime" (which is what he called the current presidency). This hasn't been funny for a long time, but now it's downright despair-inducing and terrifying.

This is what I wrote on facebook at 1:52 am on election night. I tried to post this from my phone multiple times yesterday morning, but I think the Blogger app is broken:

The dystopian future that literature has been warning about for years and years is here. The Brave New World of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid's Tale, Parable of the Sower, and, more recently, The Hunger Games is closer to reality. Go read those books if you haven't and let's prepare for a new reality in which facts may not matter anymore and prejudices speak louder than reason.

(I taught these classic "dystopian fiction" books multiple times as a teaching assistant and I learned to love the genre, these books are important, especially now! It's just kind of sad that they make me realize all that could happen if extremists ideas are carried out to their full extent.)

Thankfully most people weren't online, or I might have gotten a handful of negative comments, so that didn't happen. In any case, I with I had received more comments from like-minded people, but I decided not to re-post my thoughts yesterday. Just because I have a few people as "friends" who disagree with me and because I feel very unsafe on facebook, although I've spent many many hours there in the past two days.

I stayed up to the bitter end, on election night. I took screenshots on my phone of the unbelievable progression of NYT's graphs and charts. I also took photos of the TV screen, as it was so unbelievable -- Trump saying his victory speech while most of the networks hadn't still called his victory (not even Fox, at first). It was very surreal.

I didn't have a chance to finish watching Hillary's concession speech from yesterday (my brother- and sister-in-law facetimed us from Canada as we were watching the broadcast online and K spent a long time talking to them and explaining it). I haven't read many pieces on the elections, I have, though, read what most of my friends on facebook had to say.

I unfollowed a few people during the election, a couple of which ended up commenting back to me on other people's threads recently. I have spent some time trying gently to tell some people to be more sensitive (this one woman I know was saying the protesters should "grow up and get over it."

Sigh... There are too many thoughts in my head right now. I hope to write a couple more posts to share them and do "cheap therapy." Oh, yeah...

Last, but not least, if you're a Back to the Future fan the way our family is, you'll know that yesterday we woke up on the alternate 1985 and Biff Tannen is in charge, check out the image in this tweet. Sigh...

We need to find a way to fix it, too bad we can't travel back in time!