2016 Postmortem

Look, my voice is quite rare here, but I'm a known quantity, having been a political blogger since 2004. Perhaps I'm not a terribly well-known writer, but my name is familiar to some of you, and plenty of DU posts have linked to my site over the years.

I've been called a "concern troll" because I tend to focus on the bad news. I'm not a troll of any kind. (A bit of an ogre perhaps, but only when awakened prematurely.)

I'm not trying to depress the vote. Quite the opposite. Fear can be a great motivator, and nothing scares me more than the prospect of a Trump presidency. That's why I've been rooting for Hillary from the beginning, even at a time when many of you were bonkers for Bernie: I always thought she was the strongest candidate against the tangerine monster.

But yeah, I'm a pessimist by nature. Some people see the glass as half-full and some people see the glass as half-empty. I look at the glass and see a worldwide drought that will leave billions of parched souls dying in the dust of a waterless world spinning in a bleak, pitiless, Godless universe.

That's simply the way I am. About everything.

I know that this is supposed to be the season for cheerleading and blinkered optimism and all of that rah-rah. That's understandable. But can't you make just a little room for the natural-born Eeyores, for captious souls with a phobic reaction to any sort of rah-rah -- we few, we unhappy few, we in the circle of cynics?

And if your answer is "no," then may I at least warn against the automatic presumption of malefic intent? That way paranoia lies. Paranoia is the specialty of Alex Jones and his brethren; we imitate his odious example at our peril.