As I drove home tonight, watching people ahead of me pull U-turns around flares at a downed intersection, too strapped for time on a rainy election night to wait for the go-ahead to pass, I thought, "You know, this is how it starts."
Some mild re-routing, a few outages... "It could be a test run," I thought. "A prelude to what the next election might be like, were some apocalyptic, anti-civilization party pulling out all the stops to keep the White House under control."
You know it'd be just like this, too: red taillights flashing on, murk rising from tailpipes, as precious minutes left to vote ticked by. "Why are we stopped?" Oh, it seems the road has flooded to the tops of our tires. A power line's down; the lights are out. A desperate lone cop is manning the intersection, amid swirling pollutants, sirens, not one, but two flash floods at rush hour ... on election day ... in the middle of one of the most liberal-voting precincts in the city...
But it's just the storm, right?
Wham! I blink. Some guy in an SUV is driving right over the flares put down to safeguard the intersection. Is he running late to exercise his right to vote, cruising for his very civil liberty, or blithely gabbing on his cell about a business transaction? You've gotta wonder, at times like these.
Driving home (or attempting to drive home) tonight, I was, for a moment, given a very real glimpse of how it might go if they did decide to hijack an election.