2016 never felt so far away as it does now.
I remember a little under a year ago attending a Hillary Clinton rally. After Hillary's speech, I was able to move up to the rope line and wait patiently as she worked the crowd. Finally she got to me and I had the opportunity to shake her hand, tell her that my young daughters were excited about a "girl" president, and see her smile before she moved on to the next person down the line.
I assumed at that point I had just met the 45th President of the United States. That I had just shook the hand of the first female President of the United States, and that I'd have a great story to tell my kids and grandkids for years to come as they read the history books.
I assumed that after November, the name "Donald Trump" would eventually fade from the headlines. That after much whining and sour grapes on his part, the American people would write him off as a joke and a failure. That much like Sarah Palin, he'd be regulated to being a caricature of someone who we thankfully dodged a bullet, and no one in their right mind would even admit to having voted for him. We'd all joke to ourselves, "Remember that time when a failed reality show host and obnoxious businessman almost became our president? That was a good one."
We'd have then moved towards the inauguration, and there'd be a combination of that same sort of historical excitement we had when President Obama was inaugurated mixed with a small amount of 1990s styled Clinton nostalgia to boot.
I wouldn't have expected too much to have changed from the Obama administration to the Clinton administration, but that would have been more than fine. The steady momentum over the previous eight years would have remained undisturbed and we would have seen most--if not all--of the same policies that worked to our country's benefit carried over.
I'm not saying it would have been all sunshine and rainbows. I'm sure some purists would still be complaining that President Clinton's positions and administration members were too centrist for their tastes. I know the Republicans in Congress would probably continued to have raised the word "emails" as much as possible, but I trust that Jim Comey's ultimate determination that it was not anything that constituted any sort of illegal activity would have remained unchanged, and we'd only have bluster from the right.
Hopefully we'd have some investigation into Russian attempts at interfering in the election, but ultimately Putin would have been left out in the cold, rejected and defeated and with nothing to show for his efforts.
No, where I thought we'd be now back in 2016 wouldn't have been perfect.
But it certainly wouldn't have been....this.
No gutting of government agencies. Not even a realistic chance that the ACA could be in jeopardy. No withdraw from the Paris accord or attempts to silence climate change scientists. No waking up every single morning and wondering how our President has chosen to embarrass himself over social media this time. No revolving doors of figures from the administration. No nuclear "diplomacy" by Twitter that boils down to threatening to annihilate people. No constant self-flagellation martyr drama about the "fake news" media not kowtowing to glorify his existence.
No incitement to support white supremacists to act out violently.
This is not where I saw us being back in 2016. It all seemed way too simple back then, all too normal. We really did take what we had and what we should have had for granted, as if none of this would have ever happened.
Or, as Arcade Fire put it in their song "The Suburbs (Continued)":
If I could have it back
All the time that we wasted, I'd only waste it again
If I could have it back
I know I would love to waste it again
Waste it again and again and again
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my twin daughters first Presidential election to vote, and my 23 year old son was in tears about the results. I was in shock, horrible day, as a nation we lost our souls. But then again I will NEVER do this 
