You probably don’t recall the last day of March in 1998 – hey, I’m struggling to remember the days of last week – but it might help us figure out how to think about what happened on November 5th, when American voters decided that Donald Trump should get another chance to lead our nation.
Many of us remain shocked and disheartened by what happened on Election Day this year. There’s good reason for that, but we have to figure out what to do next. And there’s a kernel of understanding that we might take from that unmemorable day 26 years ago.
It was on March 31, 1998, at 12:01 a.m. Central Time, that some folks in Garland, Texas, expected to witness the most important event in history – namely, the end of the world as it had been known. They were followers of Chen Tao, a sect claiming that God would descend in a space ship and appear on television screens across North America just after midnight that day, then show up in person ten hours later in Garland — specifically, at 3513 Ridgedale Drive, the comfortable suburban home of the cult’s leader.
The cultists were reported by a local newspaper to be mostly immigrants from Taiwan, who had lived in California for a while before imagining that enlightenment might better be found in Texas. They dressed fully in white, wore cowboy boots and drove luxury cars, only one of those three things being at all unusual in Texas.
Anyway, he didn’t show – the Almighty, that is – and, as you know, the world did not end. So a lot of the disappointed cult members quit both Chen Tao and Texas, maybe seeking more reliable enlightenment elsewhere. Others, however, simply revised the expected expiration date by a year and moved to western New York — where they gave up the white attire but kept the boots, we’re told, while insisting that a “God plane” would someday show up, concealed in a cloud, to save them. That didn’t happen, as far as we know. I have been unable to determine if Chen Tao belief persists today – though if I saw somebody in cowboy boots dressed all in white in western New York, yes, I’d be suspicious.
This notion of failed prophesies came to mind after Election Day, when what many people had expected and hoped did not, in fact, occur: Trumpism did not crumble, a majority of voters did not conclude that democracy itself was on the ballot and we are looking toward more of what so many of us have feared: four more years of the chaos and flirtation with disaster that characterized the first term of Donald Trump.
So are we to give up hope and move on? Are we actually the cultists – those of us who believe that the Constitution rightly limits presidential power, that women have a right to control their own bodies, that tax breaks for billionaires are not an economic policy and alliances with autocrats who threaten our allies is not a smart foreign policy?
A friend said to me last week, “You know, the world didn’t end during Trump’s first term.” True enough. But it did get worse. America dropped back from addressing the catastrophic threat of climate change; we gave maneuvering room to bad players on the world stage; our own government made our society less just, and stoked the fires of unrest and hatred that lurk behind extremists everywhere. Yes, we are worried about more of that, and worse.
We are not expecting to find a rescue in a cloud from the threat that is presented by the return of Donald Trump to power. We are more realistic than that.
No, we know that our rescue must come in the way that it always does: through the hard work of committed people. Right now, we are understandably discouraged – even heartbroken – to think that Americans re-elected an amoral demagogue, a convicted felon, a play-actor at governing who even now is filling his key appointments with unqualified ideologues. But after the shock wears off, once we regain our footing, we will be re-energized.
We will be propelled, I am absolutely sure, to work again to win the support of our fellow citizens for a compassionate and competent government. It’s OK to take a break just now, folks – to stop doom-scrolling the news, to avoid some of the talk shows that repeatedly remind us of what we most worry about, to retreat just a bit from the onslaught of politics. Our mental health may depend upon it.
But then we will get back up and get to work.
No, the world didn’t end on November 5th – but neither did our responsibility to make it better. And we’ll get back to that work, each of us doing what we can. Because we must.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
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