Perhaps because I’m used to the movies and newsreels about the Holocaust that were shot in black and white and always with clouds or, at least, flat skies of gray. But always shades of gray and black, be it from the official government lens (think Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will) or the lens of those who families and communities were shaped by what and, more pointedly, who Riefenstahl’s lens hyped up as the paragon of European nationalism (think Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List).

[Image: “Sometimes I Told You So” by Navi Robins]

Ever since The Election, the clouds have been appropriately gray here in my side of the Midwest. Any other time of the fluctuating seasons, I would chalk it up to the usual cloudiness of winter in these parts, with the gray canopy forming an aerial blanket that will cover — or threaten to cover — the earth with snow. (One of my friends’ daughter said she always knows when she’s about to get to my part of the country because of the clouds that hang over the area.)

But this time, the clouds, though the same palette of grays, are a mourning veil for the beginning of the Christian theocratic dystopia that too many white voters — and, bewilderingly, some voters of color, even though the incoming administration’s policies target them in so many ways — wanted.

I didn’t know I was petty weather-wise, but America deserves the cloudy days until it rids itself of the myriads and levels of bigotry and other exploitation that allowed so many people to vote for this second presidency. The atmospheric conditions should reflect the cruelly gray days to come, caused by said voters setting this country on fire.