"Goodbye and thanks for all the fish."

That quote, in case you're not familiar with it, comes from Douglas Adams' seminal Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was attributed to the dolphins as they were teleporting themselves off the Earth in advance of the Vogon's demolition armada and seems especially fitting considering today's tweet from the Unstable Orange Shitgibbon:

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

Never in my life have I been so gripped with fear for the future as I am now—and not just for me and my loved ones, but for this entire fucking planet. While I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was born only a couple years before it happened so I have no conscious memory of the events, but in the years that followed I did grow up learning the laughable Duck-and-Cover routine and living under the specter of Russian nukes raining down from the skies at any moment.

It wasn't until the fall of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union that I—and no doubt the rest of humanity—was able to breathe a collective sigh of relief. The Cold War was over and a general understanding grew that because of mutually assured destruction, nuclear weapons would never be used in another war.

But then, sometime over the last twenty or so years, humanity started going collectively batshit insane and now, thanks to the cheeto-faced fuckmuppet and the powder keg that all of civilization seems to have become over the last several years, that's no longer a given. As I half-jokingly said during the primaries, "If Trump is elected and has the nuclear launch codes, all it's going to take is one foreign leader to diss him on Twitter and it's GAME OVER."

It's no longer a joke.

Never mind the loss of civil liberties and societal progress we've made over the past 50 years that a Trump "presidency" brings to this country. I'm starting to worry about the annihilation of all life on earth because that unqualified, mangled apricot hellbeast with a hair-trigger temper has the intellect, emotional maturity and self-restraint of a toddler. I mean he is still whining about not winning the popular vote! I have never seen a more sore group of winners than that fucktrumpet and his vulgar, ignorant minions in my entire life.

I only pray that when the bombs start falling, I—and my loved ones—are at or near ground zero. I want it to be over in a flash; to be incinerated before the pain signals even reach my brain. The alternative—to die a slow, painful death over the days or weeks that follow is something I don't even want to contemplate. And the absolute last thing I want to do is to "survive" a nuclear war and witness the downfall of civilization.

I'm seriously starting to wonder if this is the reason the Universe is not teeming with interplanetary explorers knocking at our door. Perhaps 99.99999% of all sentient life that arises in this universe cyclically destroys itself each and every time it's on the verge of becoming a spacefaring species and there are only a handful that survive their perpetual childhood and mature, wandering the blackness of space encountering nothing but the burnt-out cinders of millions of civilizations that weren't as lucky as they.

Alternately, perhaps it will take a near-civilization-ending event to force humanity to finally grow up, put aside our infantile beliefs in invisible sky fairies and finally come to realize we're all in this together and no one's going to save us but ourselves. As Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones," and it seems more true now than ever.

Looking to the Star Trek universe, it must be remembered that their society arose only from the ashes of a nuclear war—although to be honest I doubt humanity will recover as quickly as it did in the Trek timeline unless the next war is a very limited one—something I find extremely unlikely in today's climate of supercharged hate and intolerance.

The sense of dread so many of us are feeling is not hyperbole. It's not sour grapes because our guy girl lost. Hell, I've been voting all my adult life and there have been only a handful of elections when the candidate I voted for actually won. I've had to suffer through bad president after bad president—Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II—doing what they could do to fight progress and set the clock back to some mythic "Ozzie and Harriet" time in America that never even existed. But Trump's treasonous ascendancy to the presidency and the fact that he is now surrounding himself with people who are without exception the absolute antithesis of the posts they are filling is NOT business as usual. This is not normal! It is not just a case of "good presidents come and go." For the first time in our history, we are about to have someone at the helm of this country who has the capability of causing an extinction level planetary event and no one seems to care or understand except a few of us acting as modern day Cassandras screaming into the darkness. Unless his own party—or the opposition finally grows a spine—and stands up, says No Donnie, you can't nuke [insert country of your choice]! and takes away his goddamned Twitter, I'm not holding out hope the United States will not be recognizable—much less have another presidential election when he can be removed from office—in four years.