Took my dog outside in the morning and saw the gold and pink sky ready itself for the sun to rise over the St Lawrence. A pair of crows were starting their day with what sounded like an argument. I woke up thinking about the US election – and feeling sick to my stomach. Some of it’s disgust that so many people would vote for such a hateful man. And some of it is fear of what the future brings in the wake of his return.

I worry about the boring things, like the regulation of food and drugs, statistics collection, tracking and controlling the spread of disease. It doesn’t take much for bad leadership to undermine those things. The US is a major part of the complex international systems that allow people to live safely and have some quality of life. What happens when they fail?

I feel a sickness and disappointment that Americans would vote in a leader whose whole campaign was about hate. Hate for women and children, hate for immigrants, hate for minorities. Hate for everyone except his chosen few: mostly white men.

Why have the Republicans allowed their party to be hijacked by a despot? There are what, 335 million Americans? Surely they could have found a better candidate.

I used to think that to do something that really makes a difference, I would have to be an activist. And maybe when I retire, I will be. But these days, it feels a little radical just to play music at a local session. Sessions create a kind of organic, living musical event in a public place that draws people out of themselves, whether they are playing an instrument or just listening while having a drink. I used to take such things for granted, but the pandemic showed me how easily they can disappear.  

I wonder if among the reasons so many American voters chose Trump is because they are under the thrall of his mesmerizing form of lying. His speeches are strings of lies – absurd things, like immigrants eating pets, or simple denial of facts, like saying it’s raining when it is not. Or his many, many lies about COVID when he touted fake cures and announced fictitious statistics about his success in defeating it. I find when I listen to him, I note the first lie and think of how I can verify it’s not true, and then there’s a second lie, then a third, and within a minute or two, I’ve forgotten what the first lie was.

I imagine for many people, such a barrage of falsehoods would cause them to doubt reality, especially if they live in regions without good local news, or solid, factual news in general, at all levels. The constant lying by this public figure that many worship, combined with false news from the far right and the lack of a concrete understanding of local and regional contexts has certainly led to a fog of unknowability. Apparently, this like of lying is part of a propaganda technique used in Russia to confuse people until they give up on trying to understand what’s actually true.

I am always looking for the truth. Understanding what is happening by knowing the facts is really important to me in everything I do, whether in my job or my personal life. It’s what guides me. I’m lucky to work with some former journalists who operate in a similar way. Always assessing and analyzing what’s happening, gathering details and being scrupulous about what’s written down or said. I think any experience we have with wholeness and joy emerge from how we engage with reality itself. We honour it by reflecting back its beautiful, living details.

In this vein, I think perhaps the most obvious weakness that comes from using lying as a means of unmooring people from what is actually happening around them is that lies are false. If the people who are spreading lies lose their bearing and make decisions based on their own lies, things will go badly off track, break down and eventually cease functioning.

Maybe this will lead Americans to resist dictatorship by liars. Our species has a strong drive to survive, and we won’t survive very long if our systems break down. Americans are used to getting what they want and have a long history of working hard to get it. It’s a sad thought, but maybe America’s workaholic, capitalist tendencies will be the thing that saves them.

I live in the (naïve) hope that our need for to cooperate in order to survive and flourish might also prove stronger than Trump’s lies. Will the Americans who are in his thrall wake up one day and realize they’ve handed given control of their country to a nasty, ugly old man who has nothing to offer but fear and hate?