I’m feeling the despair, too, man, but it’s my nature to be a fighter and an optimist in spite of all that, so I wrote an article arguing for progressives to lick their wounds for a bit but to get back into the ring with even more effort to push Sanders back over the top.

Also, my ability to live with that despair may just be because I’ve lived with this despair for 20-plus years now. The 2000 election debacle is somewhat forgotten today, but that was the year I really started to give more credence to a strange intuition I’d had in the mid 1990s that the U.S. was likely to break up like the U.S.S.R. in my lifetime (I’m 47 now).

And to be honest, recently that intuition has been growing stronger and feels like even a Sanders win makes me feel the odds of a U.S. break-up decreases to about 50/50 … in this decade. Could be just crazy talk, but that’s where I’m at and I’m also in a place where I wouldn’t say a break-up of the U.S. is a good or bad thing. It’s more a matter of how the break-up occurs if it happens.

Anyway, definitely a tough week but I’d finish by saying that 2020 seems to be reiterating a lesson to me — expect the unexpected — and with what I perceive as a panic over the Coronavirus all but shutting down my work life here in Japan in March, we really don’t know what major events will unwind between now and July which could turn the race.