President* Trump,

I know it’s silly to worry about time and shifting seasons since they’re impossible to control, but as we march through August and the days get shorter and shorter, I’m increasingly worried about how we (me, my little family, all of us) are going to do as our options for safe social distancing diminish when the rains and cold temperatures come. Actually, I feel like this is another crazy ping-pong deal. On the one hand, I’ve got this desperate wish for November 3^rd to hurry up and get here and for election results that tell us we don’t have another four years of you, and on the other, I don’t want fall to come because the thought of dealing with COVID when it’s dark and cold by 4:30 or 5:00 in the afternoon is really sucky. We aren’t super social, but we do rely on warm evenings in the backyard with friends perched in strategically placed chairs, and no amount of sweaters and sweatshirts is going to make this a viable option when the rains start in again.

Maybe the dismalness of the unrelenting hunkering will be offset by the closer temporal proximity of the election and the hope that this part of the nightmare will be over soon. It does help a lot now that we know Biden stepped up and chose Harris as his running mate. Really, super good news, there!

In the meantime, what do you have up your sleeves to bludgeon us with if it continues to look like your chances of a second term are circling the drain? Do we need to worry about you declaring war on another country? On ‘Blue States’? Are your coded calls to arms going to become less coded? Unfortunately we no longer have the luxury of pretending that our form of government and our country are strong enough to withstand bad faith assaults from the Executive Office. We’ve all seen how much damage someone like you can do if he has the support of boot-licking, ass-kissing toadies. In other words, I think it’s naïve to think things like “oh, it can’t really get much worse” or “even Trump wouldn’t do X….” or “no, seriously, we are strong, we’ll bounce back.” You all are capable of much, much worse and we need to not kid ourselves about this.

I know I’ve been telling you the last few days that I’ve been feeling more sad (perhaps a shade depressed even) and anxious than usual lately and as tempting as it is to say that these dark worries are byproducts of this emotional state, I don’t think they are. You know, when depressed people’s reality testing is actually tested alongside that of people who aren’t depressed, it’s the depressed people who’re reading reality more accurately. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule and someone who is so depressed that they can see absolutely no possibility that things could ever get better may well not be correct, but generally speaking, depression seems to be associated with truth-seeing and truth-telling, which even under normal circumstances can be very, very heavy and hard and is likely why non-depressed people don’t often go there.

Bottom line is that depressed or not, I think things are going to get measurably worse before they get better and I also think that getting rid of you is just the beginning of the hard, long road ahead of us. It’s a start though, and so now that I’ve talked to myself about it, bring on the dark and the rain – let’s get to election day as fast as we can!

May we be safe from whatever POTUS and his minions are scheming.
May we be willing to hang in and take care of each other as the seasons change.
May we be strong and healthy physically, emotionally, and morally.
May we accept that we can’t let up in this struggle for all of us.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson