I find that now that the election is over, it’s the first time I want to talk about it. I realize now that while I thought I was avoiding politics because it was a theater, there was also another reason. I was shocked that somebody like Mitt Romney could lie as much as he does and get away with it. I was shocked that most news networks and voters had the memory spans of three-year-olds..that we now live in such a confused and histrionic world that we can be lied to outright and, through doublethink or distraction, not be able to address it as such. It was terrible to watch Romney’s constant and gross factual distortions be compared to Obama’s, which were nothing like them.

How does this bode for any attempt to allow scientific fact to lead a discussion on climate change, diet, nuclear safety? For facts to lead us into and out of war? George W. Bush allowed for an expanded executive branch ripe for (and in the process of) exploitation. And Mitt Romney has proven definitively, in a way nobody really had before, the primacy of appearance and class/party warfare over truth, even when the truth is easy to find.

Not that I’m saying anything golden about the Democratic Party. Not that this is the GOP’s fault. It’s systemic. It’s advertising, which has so thorougly confused our ability to discern truth. It’s the 24/7 news media. It’s the enmeshment between private corporations and our government and the news.

And I wasn’t able to truly contemplate that this man, this campaign, this party that has descended into a spin factory, was about to be chosen as our leader.