Love ‘im or . . . meh, Joe Biden is probably the next guy who’s butt will be in the chair behind the big desk in the Oval Office.

And honestly, whatever. He knows the gig, he’ll do fine, Kamala will charm everybody and we won’t be a laughing stock anymore. Which is great.

But as for all the other stuff . . . Let’s face it, he’s the guy the DNC decided was going to be the nominee long before anybody ever started running, and he’s most likely to be the corporate, moderate, don’t-make-waves guy they wanted. So guess what. That means it’s on us to make him into the President we actually want.

That means we can’t let up for a minute on protesting, writing letters, making phone calls, and doing everything we can on social media to let him know we’re not fooled and we aren’t going to roll over and let him be average when what we want is the most courageous President in American history. We want a President who will tell the corporate big wigs to go piss up a rope, and make the changes we need. And the only way he’s going to know that we won’t settle for less is for us to tell him, loud and long, and from every possible direction.

Do we need a break? Oh hell yes, but we’re not going to get one. And we can’t afford one. Hurricanes in Iowa? Fire tornadoes in California? Twin cyclones heading into the Gulf of Mexico? And all that on top of a pandemic that is now basically us a USdemic because everybody else in the world got smart and started wearing masks. Hell yes we need a break, but we don’t have time. The sky is pretty much falling. Put on your marching shoes anyway.

What the hell. After this is all over, think of what great shape you’ll be in.

I wish I could be excited and filled with hope, but I’m really not. Joe is safe. Kamala as President would have been a little more exciting, but Joe . . . well, he’s safe. He’s also safe for the corporate interests that, as George Carlin so famously said, really own this country. He’s not going to rock their boat, even though their boat needs to be torpedoed and set on fire. They have no intention of taking historic action like Medicare For All because ooh, we can’t piss off the  insurance lobby. And no real action on climate change because that would  be too scary for the poor snowflakey corporate overlords to deal with. So this will be a perfectly safe chicken-shit administration, which is frankly a million times better than what we currently have, but it’s not what we want or need.

So sharpen your pencils, but a ton of stamps, polish up your walking shoes, get out your poster board and buy a new set of markers, because we are gonna be at this a while. He’s at least reasonable and can understand sentences and knows how to read, so to some degree this will be a LOT easier than dealing with the incumbent. But he’s also got some big blind spots, and he has a tendency to dig his heels in when he feels threatened. Even so, we’ll be light years ahead of where we are now, and that’s something.

Need a little compassionate snark to keep you going? Yup, that would be me.