As far as this “being the last election”, there’s too many safeguards in our governmental system and too many armed people (in both the civilian and military population) with deep vested interests to ensure real elections still happen for that to change.

I’m not so sure considering there’s a good argument to be made that this wasn’t a “real” election, given all the voter suppressing bullshit that happened. I think we need to ask ourselves what a “real” election is and how we will know if we lose them, because I don’t think even our good elected officials are going to tell us about it (because they think, arguably correctly, that living under a stable autocracy is better than the chaos that could happen when a mass of people reject the legitimacy of the government).

Bad times are not end times.

This is true and cannot be said enough. The world doesn’t end, it moves on to the next struggle, and there is always a way to make it better. It might be very small, but there is always something to do. Like, yesterday I ended up up hanging out with some very sad old ladies who volunteered for my local League of Women Voters chapter and got them to laugh a couple of times at how ridiculously bad at bridge I am, and that was the little bit of good I could do yesterday. It wasn’t much, but it was something.