Only after hitting rock bottom will Americans begin to rise again

2016 Sucked. The fact we lost so many artists, friends and icons really sucked. The results of the election super-sucked. What we are looking forward to in the future of our country is, for a great many of us, truly a nightmare scenario. Hard-right Republicans have control of both houses of Congress with an agenda to destroy healthcare coverage for 30 million Americans, to privatize the Veterans Administration and Medicare with vouchers that will provide less care at higher costs, to gut environmental protections, consumer and worker-safety regulations, reverse our hard-fought gains on climate change and to put Social Security in the hands of Wall Street hedge funds.

And then you have the President-Elect who can’t stop tweeting — with his tiny sausage fingers — nonsense arguments defending and deflecting the influence of the Kremlin-sponsored hacking and white nationalist propaganda on our democracy while plotting a mass deportation plan along with some type of “extreme vetting” for immigrants, Muslims in a database, mosques under surveillance, and our urban centers squeezed under the jack-boot of a nationwide stop-and-frisk regime as he himself makes money hand over fist while continuing to own his D.C. hotel and expanding projects in dozens of nations whose heads of state he’s now going to be having over at Mar-A-Lago on the weekends and New Years at $500 a head.

There’s no way this story turns out well. Many of us already know that, but many are in blatant denial. That situation can not be allowed to go on without being challenged, without being changed.  And it may be unfortunate, but also true, that this won’t change until some people are forced out of their denial by having the absolute worst-case scenario shoved right into their face. Some people just won’t get it until they see things finally hitting rock bottom.

We may already be closer to that point than some of us already clanking the bells of warning might believe.