Dear Fellow Americans, what the hell were you thinking? 

Is this really the best we could do? 

You had two choices in November 2024, and this is what you chose?

(Thanks for nothing). 

One of the candidates had been around far too long and seemed detached from the reality around him. 

Hell, you already gave him a chance, and he f*cked that up.

The other one was sort of the best that could be offered, given the time constraints. (Oh, yeah, she was also Black, Indian American, and a woman.)

But you told yourself there was no way you were going to vote for her, although many of us did. What the hell, it seemed like a no-brainer to me. 

On top of this conundrum, we were supposed to make a decision that would determine the future of this nation for the next several decades, if not longer. 

All this in an atmosphere of hatred, vitriol, power-mongering, and disinformation, both domestic and foreign, where whichever way the election went, millions of Americans were going to be royally pissed, possibly throwing this nation into the worst of times since the Civil War.

And trust me, we are pissed.

And now, the other millions of people who voted for this scoundrel are now also royally pissed.

We warned you that this poor excuse for a human being was a charlatan, a grifter, a cheat, a bamboozler, a felon, and a regular P.T. Barnum, last seen shouting from the rooftops, “A sucker is born every minute.”

In the end, you didn't listen.

On the other hand, I could not vote for a man for whom I can’t even describe my contempt. 

I was guided by the objections that I described in The Ministry of Lies and A Mob of Sheep. 

Yes, I did not enjoy being forced to vote for the lesser of two evils (okay, evil may not be the right word, but it’s close) so that we can save Democracy, or at least what we think is a Democracy. 

What gets my goat is that, in the process, I have to save an economic system that has gone so haywire, creating such a wealth gulf that even a conservative commentator, Bret Stephens, recognizes it in his column, “How Capitalism Went Off the Rails.” 

So now I’m stuck with the decision millions of my fellow Americans have made, some of whom are now saying, “But, but, he was going to save us!” 

They’re left wondering what went wrong.

Crazy, man.

I’m part of the problem, I admit. 

One moment, I can call for rational dialogue with people who would like to send me back to where I came from (I don’t want to return to the South Bronx, though I hear it’s gentrifying nicely these days). 

The next moment, I am not above calling down a plague of locusts and meteors upon those same people. 

They want me extinguished, and I want them to go away. 

But they are not going away, and I’m not going to allow myself to be extinguished or exiled to the South Bronx. 

(Unless they gift me a three-bedroom condo on the top floor with a balcony at the southernmost tip of the borough, offering a spectacular view of the East River and Manhattan on one side and Queens on the other. Hey, I’m easy.) 

Somehow, some way, we are going to need to step back and recognize that while many Americans are going at each other’s throats, threatening to take each other out in an orgy of violence and political warfare, the actual beneficiaries of that warfare are sitting back, waiting for the right moment to swoop in and claim their bounty. 

The power-hungry, the Wall Street merchants, the K Street loyalists, the multinational corporations, the ultra-rich eager for another tax break, and the others who will gloat over the carcass left when we finish offing each other. 

I know it sounds like a crazy, paranoid, conspiracy-laden diatribe, but take a step back and think this through. 

Who will be the real winners of an impending civil war? 

It will not be the weak, the poor, the working-class stiffs, or the members of the vast dispossessed classes who are on their knees, praying for their number to hit, for that ten-cent-off coupon, or for that lotto ticket burning a hole in their pocket for days, only to suddenly blast out into the stratosphere, rewarding them with millions in buckaroos, only to have half taken away by the state to fund tax credits for downtown developments benefiting some crony developer who gave just the right amount of political donation to the right candidate for the right political office. 

And here we stand.

Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States, and it’s obvious he has no clue. 

As we stated earlier and can't say it enough, he is a poor excuse for a human being, a charlatan, a grifter, a cheat, a bamboozler, a felon, and a regular P.T. Barnum, last seen shouting from the rooftops, “A sucker is born every minute.”

You thought you were buying the working class's salvation? 

You bought something, all right, and now it's time to pay. 

This is a watershed moment when all the progressive struggles and advances of the past one hundred years are threatened: the rights of workers (regardless of race), women, people of color, and people living in poverty, who have been battered by the economic winds of a capitalist system run amuck. 

If we could see the forest for the trees, the pebbles in the desert sands, the one silent moment in history, outside the din of the shouting mob, when it all becomes clear that the future can be different, that we have the power to change what we have taken for granted far too long.

We love to embrace the old narrative that we are a freedom-loving, patriotic, exceptional United States of America. 

The reality is that the us is not all of us, according to those who scream the loudest. 

We know who they mean.

You, me, and the other us are being tricked into thinking that the rich and powerful are going to lend us a hand or a dime or the slice of the American Pie that they promise us in the Yankee Doodle Dandy Betsy Ross flag-waving star-spangled banner waving over America the Beautiful. 

Stop dreaming. 

Wake up, wake up, before we’re all through (a nod to The Last Poets). 

Because the revolution isn’t what you think it is, and we don’t have no time for a civil war.