There’s no use trying,” Alice says, in Chapter Five of Lewis Carroll’s “Through The Looking- Glass.” “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the (White) Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
As I understand it, there is a branch of quantum physics which insists that, whenever there is a decision point where things go one way, there is also, necessarily, an alternate universe created where they go the other way, instead.
If this is true, then for every time I take an extra dessert (like last night’s amazing cheesecake), somewhere there is an alternate universe containing a skinny Judy who did not.
Obviously, that’s also the universe with the Judy who goes jogging every chance she gets.
More seriously, I believe that another such alternate reality was created on Dec. 12, 2000.
That was the day when the Supreme Court of the United States stopped the recount in Florida in the 2000 presidential election; their decision effectively awarded the presidency to George W. Bush, the loser of the popular vote.
His opponent, then-Vice President Al Gore, officially conceded the next day.
Until that moment, I never believed a thing like that could happen in the United States of America.
But it has become clearer to me with every passing day since then, that we are living in that other, alternate version of reality.
How else do you explain so many impossible things?
— Nearly 3,000 souls lost in a terrorist attack on our own soil, using our own domestic aircraft as the weapons.
— Americans left stranded, on the rooftops and in the dark of New Orleans’ Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, pleading for help that did not come.
— The catastrophic “meltdown” of our entire financial system, threatening a disaster to dwarf the Great Depression.
— An earthquake and tsunami that didn’t merely destroy a nuclear reactor in Japan, but caused it to melt down and explode, making the ocean itself radioactive
— Ocean water running down the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, during Hurricane Sandy.
— The cold-blooded gunning-down of 20 small children and six adults at an elementary school in Connecticut … and, even more unbelievably, our failure to do much of anything afterwards to stop it from happening again.
— Great Britain’s choice to secede from the European Union, which may cause Scotland to se-cede in turn from Great Britain — leaving it just plain “Britain” for the first time since Shakespeare was alive.
And now, apparently, Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States.
None of these things could possibly have happened in the country — or the world — where I grew up.
Sure, even in my America, a young and charismatic president John F. Kennedy could be assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
But even so, that was succeeded by a President Johnson getting a meaningful Voting Rights Act through Congress; President Nixon being able to congratulate America’s astronauts as they walked upon the surface of the moon; and President George H.W. Bush extending access and rights to millions of Americans with disabilities.
In that America, things maybe took too long, but at least we were slowly bringing justice and opportunity to more and more Americans. We were also an inspiration and a source of stability for the whole rest of the world.
These days, I just feel trapped in a science fiction story — a bad one.
I am hoping that our story, like many others, contains the chance, however slim, of a journey back to the right reality.
In “Back to the Future,” Marty McFly had to bring his DeLorean time machine to 88 miles per hour precisely as he passed his town’s clocktower — at the exact same instant when lightning was going to strike.
That’s nothing compared to what we must do: convince the Electoral College to make right, this time, what has been broken, and award this contest to the winner of the popular vote.
It’s risky. It’s dangerous.
But surely it’s no more dangerous than navigating a route around a black hole (for example, Gargantua in “Interstellar”) or “slingshotting” the starship Enterprise around the Sun. One infinitesimal mistake and everyone burns to a crisp.
On the other hand — what choice do we have?
Somewhere, my mother and I are crying tears of joy, that, in her lifetime, America finally saw fit to elect a woman to the highest office in the land.
I have to get back to that version of America.
You cannot make me believe that this one is real.
