n this our time of plague...

 Our subject this time around is: It's Been  A Year: How has the new administration and the second year of the Pandemic affected you?

Simply put on the change of presidents: I no longer dread what the previous president is going to say or do to make this country look bad or fall further into disrepair. You may not agree with me, but I think President Biden has already done far more to help this country than Trump ever managed. I'll do you one better. I genuinely believe that the current plague we are enduring would have been under control by now if Trump hadn't actively made it worse. 

It's nice to have a president who takes his job seriously, and who doesn't want to alienate every ally the United States has made in 200 years. It's so nice, in fact, that writing is easier for me. I can let my imagination focus on stories, instead of the next disaster waiting to drop on the nation where I live and work.

I say that despite having endured Covid-19 myself and dealing with a critically ill spouse who spent seven weeks in the ICU on a respirator. despite having had THAT discussion with her at one point, via text message because she could not breathe well enough to speak,  Which discussion? Funeral needs. What to say to her family members when the time came to announce her death. That discussion. And folks, if you don't think I blame our last president for the disease spreading so casually around the country and causing huge numbers of deaths, then you weren't listening to the man rant about how Covid-19 was little more than another strain of the flu. 

If I need to go to a dark place in my writing, I just think about the last administration's efforts to ignore all of the safeguards we had in place in case of a pandemic, and I get just as dark as I need to. Whether he is simply a buffoon or actively went out of his way, I firmly believe that the last administration did everything possible to ruin this nation and was only stopped by the people around him who stopped his worst actions. The fact that he seriously considered raining nuclear death down on China when he lost the election is enough to chill me to the bones, and I write horror for a living. I don't scare easy. 

So,m yeah, I think I'm in a better place now than I was a year ago. I think the future is brighter than it was.  My wife is home and in a better state than she was at the beginning of the year.  I have lost people to Covid, but she was not among them. The current president is working hard to repair the damage caused by a blithering clown, and trying to crush Covid. 

I can see light in the distance, and I can imagine a world where the US is not the laughing stock of the free world. 

It's a good thing. 

And now back to the novel in progress. 

Have a great day.