Maybe it’s just something Hollywood movies instill in us when we’re young — the idea that we can have real emotional closure, a dramatic, satisfying, healing ending to even an unbearably tragic series of events. I think of this in terms of my own life and the life of our experiment in democracy. I will focus on the second one, on this day before Election Day.

We can, as a democratic nation, repudiate the forces that are determined to control everyone based on the insatiable greed of a privileged few and, in service to their huge Christian evangelical voting block, impose perverted religious views on everyone. A girl who is raped, her trauma multiplied when she discovers she’s pregnant, has less rights than the rapist’s six week and one day old fetus, according to these twisted lovers of a funhouse mirror version of Jesus. Destroying the planet with unregulatable pollution is the right of those with the power to do so, if it will make them the world’s first trillionaires, because — freedom. Hoarders of obscene wealth are admired while those living in intergenerational poverty are reviled as parasitic “losers” who didn’t have the sense to be born to wealthy families.

Let’s say Harris wins by 20,000,000 votes (she should), and wins the accursed Electoral College, her party takes the Senate and the House, and MAGA’s attempts to overturn the results, including the cherub faced soulless fanatic from Louisiana’s “secret plan” to nullify the results, a rash of riots across the country and frantic appeals to Scalia’s evil spawn on the Supreme Court, fail to install Trumpie as president for life.

It would be a great relief to at least 180 million Americans to have a president who doesn’t spout endless lies, launch hourly, bullying attacks on countless “sick”, “dangerous” “enemies”, conduct secret talks with dictators and war criminals and unleash hate speech addressed toward entire groups of “the enemy within” while constantly threatening violence. It would be excellent to live under an administration that actually has reality-based positions and an agenda to make things better, instead of the far-right’s enforced loyalty to a figurehead deranged in his anger and drunk on fantasies of deadly revenge. Would a resounding Trump defeat be closure? No, but it would be a very good start.

Closure comes only when a sense of fairness is restored, the widening chasm between the top 1% and everyone else is closed. Powerful criminal conspirators get prosecuted alongside the hapless, violent foot soldiers they unleash. A treason preaching former general is recalled to active duty and dishonorably discharged, his pension cancelled. Bullying and abuse become the subjects of serious cultural scrutiny and national dialogue. The wealthiest citizens and corporations are required to pay their fair share of taxes. A living wage is guaranteed to all workers by federal law. Police violence is curbed, use of excessive, often deadly, force is not shielded by “qualified immunity”. Gun violence is curbed by regulating who can own firearms and when they may be reasonably restricted. The Supreme Court is recalibrated, with term limits, a strict, enforceable ethics code, the addition of several non-partisan justices who don’t belong to an orthodox far-right judicial fraternity. The right to vote is once again protected by law, as are women’s rights, healthcare, and civil rights of all kinds.

Partisanship in drawing gerrymandered districts to consolidate minority power is ruled as unconstitutional as nakedly racist gerrymandering. Serious care is given to solving the existential, rapidly accelerating climate crisis mankind, and all of the creatures of the earth, are facing. Norms of civil society are restored, and codified into democracy-protecting law, where necessary. Hatred of minorities, and baseless attacks on judges and other public officials, may no longer be preached by elected officials with impunity. The fairness doctrine is restored for mass media news reporting, including fact-checking for social media. The filibuster, that relic of human slavery, is ended, along with the Electoral College. Democratic debate on issues of public importance returns, in a robust and meaningful way.

These things would be a good start to real closure on our Age of Raging Narcissism and the rule of the angriest and most corrupt among us. We have more things that unite us, more common goals, than the things that are used to divide us.

Maybe I’m just primed by Hollywood, and the human longing to see justice, but that kind of closure seems entirely reasonable to me. With communication, conversation, an ability to listen and make oneself heard and understood, closure is possible. The problem is the millions among us who cannot communicate, except on their strict terms, and who are able to listen only until they feel violated (and they’re hypersensitive to this feeling), at which point they respond the only way they know how. That way of responding never leads to closure, and, to my eternal disappointment, it is still hard for me to get closure about the fact that closure will often be impossible.

Sorry for that lack of closure, here, I truly am. Even as I am hopeful for a good result in the election between an insane agent of eternal grievance and senseless retribution (and the 39 year-old, self-righteous psychopath who will be installed as soon as the figurehead is taken out of the picture by their handlers) and flawed, human, well-intentioned public servants who will earnestly address actual problems and don’t aspire to lead a Nazi-like national cult and rain violent repression down on the meek and helpless.

I can dream, can’t I?  But, of course, the main thing at the moment is heading off the worst case scenario.  Talk about a bad dream.