Well. This Has Been a Week.

Just one short week ago democracy had a watershed moment. The repercussions will be with us for a very long time. The world is indeed a changed place, although the nature of that change has yet to be fully revealed.

If you have recently begun to question your voting choice, please know that you are not alone. Millions share your concern.

Please know that I forgive you. I realize that my forgiveness isn't necessary or asked for, but I forgive you anyway. It's really more important that you forgive yourself, which may be hard, but may begin with the knowledge that you are no alone.

I truly believe that you were the victim of a massive and extremely well-executed decades long disinformation campaign waged most recently to great effect on social media and through other platforms, including at least one broadcast news channel on television.

I can say this because I was once you. I once succumbed to lies cleverly dressed as truth, and I was primed to believe them by a lifetime of forced adherence (both external and interal) to high-control systems, both religious and not. It is only sheer luck that placed me in the skeptic class at exactly the right moment to spare me the continued plunge down the rabbit hole. And my spouse was not any better. We watched that broadcast news channel named for a sly mammal. We listened to Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck. I believed I was on a morally and politically right path. I believed I was not a racist, sexist, misogynist human, and I believed I was not a fool.

I was, however, all of those things and likely more.

I emerged to realize that I was standing on stolen land (my ancestors were here beginning in 1620, and waged a campaign of dominance and terror against the people who had lived on this land for thousands of years), holding as my guide a 2,000 year old book written by humans, and translated over generations to meet the contemporary needs of the writers. I had been sufficiently bludgeoned with said book to keep me asking few questions, and keep me in a sort of line...but the book and it's followers never answered (reasonably anyway) the questions posed by it's own inconsistencies and dichotomies.

Then I got some help and some forgiveness, and the fog cleared, and I can now look in the mirror with a measure of peace.

Hopefully democracy will live to emerge, as she so often does, battered and scarred and wiser for the battle, but still living.

If not, then we take what comes, as it comes, and try to bring to light the deeper truths that got us to a new world order built on the backs of the people for the benefit of the very few.

More, as they say, will be revealed.

Love and peace, my friends.