By Marc Munroe Dion
Former President Donald Trump didn't get arrested today. In celebration, I took out the trash.
I was going downstairs to get the mail, and my wife gave me some trash to take out and reminded me that a half-dozen of my shirts were in the dryer, waiting to come upstairs.
And maybe this is how we've always experienced great historical events.
Two days after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, you were feeding a cow when your neighbor came over to tell you he'd been to town and he'd heard the president was dead. Maybe you didn't go right up to the house and tell your wife Lincoln was dead. Maybe you finished feeding the cow first. Lincoln would stay dead. The cow was hungry now.
Trump may well get arrested, in one state or another, on one charge or another, since the man is a wandering plague of prostitute-enjoying, election-subverting, lying, cheating, un-patriotic fun. I'll probably be doing laundry when I hear, or coming back from the store with a bag of carrots and some ice cream.
And I'm not going to like that day.
I don't like Trump, not at all, but I'll be sad on any day he's arrested, convicted or jailed.
It's not possible to jail the man for bad taste, infidelity, cheapening the country, subverting the meaning of patriotism and encouraging the most frightened percentage of the population to vote their fears. None of that stuff is illegal, and none of it should be illegal.
We're "the people." We're supposed to know. Somewhere in us, the founders thought, was some spark of conscience, some urge to do right and some inborn compass that always pointed north. If you let us talk something out, we'd get it right. After all, we'd just fought a whole war for freedom. We weren't going to be cheated out of our democratic dream by the first flag-fondler who told us he was a "businessman" and therefore never wrong.
And most of us didn't fall for it, but almost half did, and that turned the country into a bleeding wound with ragged edges.
There are people who want Trump to get arrested, and they'll drink Champagne when the handcuffs adorn his old, freckled wrists. Other people will threaten and riot and mutter darkly about the Bible and Jews and gays and every other centuries-old scab of a fear that we can pick at until it weeps anger.
I won't be on either side.
Because when you come right down to it, we natter about Trump endlessly, but the blame is on we the people.
Enough of us were scared enough that we voted against every dark fear we had, and we didn't care who told us the only thing we had to fear was everything, as long as someone told us.
If a legal case can be made against Donald Trump, then let the law proceed.
But in court or out, in jail or not, Trump doesn't count. We count, and he is what we elected once, not by popular vote but by the vote of the Electoral College, which is a perfectly legitimate way to become president. We smartened up when he ran the second time, but not by nearly enough.
I won't be happy or unhappy with whatever happens to Trump. It's too late for that kind of "our team won" feeling. I'll be sad that I live in the country that made him president, where this has happened, where the mess is now so deep that maybe it can't be cleaned up no matter how hard we try.
Marc Munroe Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.